


The Burning Stars

by GilShalos1



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Fantasy, Friendship, Gen, Magic, Original Fiction, Swords & Sorcery, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-11-04 18:11:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10996239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GilShalos1/pseuds/GilShalos1
Summary: A peace that isn't peaceful, a war undeclared ... the country of Belpond, caught between powerful neighbours, survives by the strength of its fortresses, the courage of its soldiers and the obedience of its king to his foreign masters. But an old enemy is stirring, a new force is rising, and once-stable alliances are fracturing.Three women find themselves struggling to survive in a world that no longer makes sense, but more than their own lives are at stake. The courage of a coward, the inheritance of a foundling and the strength of a scribe stand between the land they love and ...The Burning Stars.





	1. Kilda: Mead Week

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of original fiction in progress. Feedback welcome!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> his being a work-in-progress, I'm still feeling my way into the characters and plot, and making changes as a result. Hence, if you've been reading so far, this is a new first chapter, and edited versions of the following chapters will follow.

 

 

Kilda burrowed deeper into the straw and tried to ignore the sounds from the stable below.

One small privilege of her position as a courier was that she didn’t have to turn out with the dawn — or before the dawn, in the long winter months — and join the stable-hands as they began the endless round of tasks involved in keeping Synlake Hall’s horses healthy, happy, and ready for action. Usually, she got up when the others did anyway, took her turn with broom or shovel or bucket, but usually was not the week of the Mead Moon feast.

Someone shouted for another bale of hay and Kilda screwed her eyes closed tighter. _Curse the brewers by all the gods above and below_. Of course, the night before she’d been blessing them just as extravagantly, and tonight she’d probably do so again.

At the moment, though, she wished that their mothers had never been born.

“Kilda!” A familiar, penetrating little voice. “Kilda, are you awake?”

She pulled the blanket over her head. “Go away, Ifrith.”

Ifrith, _of course_ , didn’t go away, but climbed the rest of the ladder into the stable-loft and flopped down on the straw beside Kilda with a thump. “Did you drink too much again?”

Kilda resigned herself to the inevitable, and let the blanket slip down. “What do you think?”

Ifrith picked a piece of hay out of her copper-coloured curls and narrowed her eyes. Her grey gaze was enough like her father’s stern stare to make Kilda shift uncomfortably in the expectation of a tongue-lashing, even though Lord Synlake was a week’s travel south spending Mead Moon at King Pethnir’s court, and in any case, wasn’t a man to begrudge his people the occasional celebration. “You smell like you did.”

An experimental sniff at her shirt proved Ifrith right. “Full marks. And shouldn’t you be at lessons?”

“It isn’t fourth bell yet.”

“Oh, gods, then leave me alone!” 

“Mother wants you,” Ifrith said calmly. “Now, she said.”

“Tell her you couldn’t find me,” Kilda suggested.

“If I do, she’ll only come look for you herself,” Ifrith pointed out.

Ifrith was right about that, too, Kilda knew, and she rolled over and sat up, groaning. “Tell her I’m on my way.”

Ifrith didn’t move. “If I say that, will it be the truth?”

Kilda reached up to grab the nearest beam and hauled herself to her feet. “What does it look like?”

“Don’t fall down the ladder,” Ifrith said, whisked to her feet and vanished back into the stables below.

Kilda took the time to find a clean shirt — _well, a_ cleaner _shirt —_ and use the unpleasantly-full pisspot in the corner before she followed.

She’d barely got her feet on the floor before a huge hand clapped her on the shoulder. “Someone call Taernth, we’ve a demon on the — no, wait, it’s just Kilda with a hangover.”

Jadet the horse-master was a big man with a big voice, which was entirely too close to Kilda’s ear at the moment. He also had a notoriously good head for alcohol. Kilda had a fuzzy recollection of accepting his challenge to a game involving rhymes and drinking last night, which certainly explained how appalling she felt this morning. “I hope a demon _does_ get you.”

“You look like a demon already did.”

“A demon called Jadet,” Kilda muttered, and he laughed. She winced. “Gods, not so loud!”

“Get another hour or so,” he suggested.

Kilda shook her head. “Lady Synlake wants me.”

“Today?” Jadet frowned. “I’ll see Snail saddled, then.”

“Thanks.” Kilda threaded her way through the boys and girls wielding pitchforks and spades, ducked aside as someone hurled a fresh bale of hay through the door, and stopped on the threshold.

The courtyard, like Kilda, showed unmistakable evidence of last night’s celebrations. Two bleary-eyed hall servants were taking the tops off the trestle-tables and stacking them against the wall of the Great Hall, but in a lackadaisical manner that suggested their heads felt much as Kilda’s did.  Rayouf, Lord Synlake’s old hound, who’d been left behind when the lord and his guard had ridden for Ceatertown as too stiff and aged for the long trip, was investigating the scraps that had been dropped and trampled during the evening. One of the travelling peddlers who’d arrived for the festival had clearly been too drunk to remember where he’d laid his bedroll and was sleeping in an untidy heap of dark hair and striped jerkin on the steps of the Hall itself. The smithy and wainwright were empty and quiet, both Bothin and Meath having doubtless concluded that a racket of hammering was the last thing Synlake Hall needed this morning.

Kilda agreed with them. One of the stable-hands was carrying a bucket of water back from the well and Kilda took it from him, set it down, and crouched to plunge her head into the cold water.

“I pity the horse that has to drink that,” he said reproachfully as she straightened and pushed her dripping hair out of her eyes.

Kilda hoisted the bucket as if to give it back to him. When he reached for it, she up-ended it over his head. He yelped a protest, and she cuffed his ear, although not as hard as she could have. “Mind your manners when you’re talking to a woman with a hangover,” she advised, and shoved the bucket back into his hands.

Leaving him spluttering, she strode across the courtyard. Rayouf gave her a friendly wag of his tail as she passed him but didn’t turn from the serious business of finding the very tastiest dropped morsel he could. Kilda stepped over the sleeping peddler and climbed the last steps to the Great Hall doors.

  With the tables and benches still out in the courtyard, the long room looked larger than usual, its high ceiling more imposing. The horn windows near the ceiling let in a haze of golden light that brightened the painted images of the gods above but left the carvings of the gods below beneath them wreathed in shadow. The rushes had been swept out, and Kilda’s footsteps echoed strangely off the stone walls as she approached the one remaining table, the lord’s own high table at the end of the hall. It, and the chairs behind it, were massive, solid works of the woodcrafters’ art, far too big to be moved even a few feet easily, let alone dragged outside.

Lady Synlake sat in the Lord’s own chair with its high back carved with two symmetrical hounds fighting identical snakes. The hounds were winning, their jaws clamped tight on the snakes’ bodies, but it looked as if the snakes were getting ready to make a counterattack, mouths wide and fangs dripping carved poison. Ifrith had explained the story to Kilda once, over a long rainy afternoon while Kilda had been cleaning tack and Ifrith had been getting in the way.  As was usually the way with Ifrith’s stories, it had involved a lot of acting out the scenes and doing all the voices, as well as innumerable digressions and a great deal of speculation about the motives of the characters and what they should have done differently. As a result, Taernth had tracked Ifrith down and dragged her off to the lessons she’d been avoiding before she’d even gotten to the bit about the dogs and the snakes.

Kilda had been waiting for a day when she felt especially patient and long-suffering to ask her again, with the result that she still didn’t have the faintest idea  what the carving meant.

Two candles were burning in front of Lady Synlake, to give her light enough to see the parchment she was writing on. Kilda came to a stop in front of her and waited, hands behind her back, gaze carefully on the wall above Lady Synlake’s head and most definitely nowhere near her correspondence. Not that Kilda could read upside down, in fact she could barely read when the script was the right way around, but seven years riding courier for Synlake Hall had taught her that an ostentatious display of complete absence of curiosity was never a bad thing.

Ifrith, beside her mother, was unashamedly craning to read over her shoulder. Not for the first time, Kilda wondered how a mother and a daughter could be so little alike. Lady Synlake’s hair had been almost as dark as Kilda’s own when Kilda had first seen her seven years ago, only touched with a dull bronze in the strongest sunlight. She was tall and broad-shouldered, big enough to have fought in the front ranks against the Snakkinen’s second invasion with a shield and spear, and she could still put an arrow in the black four times out of five. She had the square jaw and thin mouth of a woman who knew her own mind and kept her own counsel, and from the razor-sharp part in her hair to her narrowly buttoned cuffs, there was not so much as a hair or a thread out of place.

Ifrith, on the other hand, was the image of her father, right down to the way she narrowed her eyes when she was thinking. Even in the candle-light, her hair glinted with the true bright copper that was her heritage from Densith the Cross-Eyed Queen. She was small and slight and everything about her face was slightly pointed, from her chin to her nose to the corners of her up-tilted eyes. At the moment, she was reasonably tidy, but Kilda would have bet her whole quarter’s pay that by mid-afternoon Ifrith’s clothes and face would have acquired an interesting combination of dirt and dust and ink-spots, and probably spider-webs, straw, dog-hair and crumbs as well. 

Finally Lady Synlake finished writing, laid her pen on the ink-block and looked up. “Kilda. My daughter says you’re the fastest courier in Synlake.”

Kilda shot Ifrith a look. The girl had composed her face in the solemn, stern expression that was Ifrith’s _official business_ face, and showed not a flicker of either guilt or glee at the revelation that it was her fault that Kilda had been roused out of bed early. “Andrith and Petrin are fine riders too, my lady, but I have the fastest horse.” _Which today I_ _’d be happy to lend to either one of them._

“How fast can he carry you to Faltoff?”

_South. South, and west a little_. Kilda very carefully didn’t wonder anything at all about what message Lady Synlake might need to send southward so urgently as to ignore the custom that only the most necessary work was carried on during the week of the Mead Moon. “Less than a day, my lady. Less than half a day, if there’s no trouble on the road and I push him hard.”

Lady Synlake touched the parchment and examined her finger for traces of ink. “Make it half a day,” she said, folding the parchment into three, and then three again. “But don’t risk your horse.”

_Urgent, but not an emergency_ , that meant, and Kilda nodded. “Will there be a reply?”

That wasn’t curiosity, but a necessary question. Even so, Lady Synlake raised her eyebrows a little. “No.”

“Then with your permission, my lady, I’ll overnight in Faltoff to make sure Snail is properly rested.”

The eyebrows went higher. “Snail?”

“Because he’s fast,” Ifrith explained. “It’s like Kilda being called Kilda the Coward.”

It was exactly the opposite of Kilda being called the Coward, as she’d more than once explained to Ifrith. _I_ _’m called the Coward because I run away from trouble as fast as I can_. _Which is my job, as well as my inclination. Dead couriers don_ _’t deliver messages._ “He is fast, my lady, despite the name. And we’ve had a dry few months and —”

Lady Synlake held up her hand, and Kilda fell silent. “Overnight if you want.” She held the end of a stick of sealing wax over the candle flame, dripped it onto the folded parchment and marked it with her ring. “This goes to the library,” she said, holding it out. “To Vitian, and only to him. Put it in his hand yourself.”

Kilda took the message, careful not to touch wax until it had finished hardening. “Yes, my lady.”  She might have had her own ideas about Vitian the librarian of Faltoff, to whom both Lord and Lady Synlake wrote several times a year, if she hadn’t spent the last seven years working very hard not to have any ideas at all about the messages she carried. “I’ll leave at once.”

She was only half-way back to the door when she heard pounding footsteps behind her. “Kilda, Kilda! Wait!”

Kilda didn’t slow. “Don’t have time, Iffy.”

The girl caught up. “If I help with Snail — ”

“Jadet will have him saddled already.”

“If I fetch you something to eat — ”

“I’ll be in Faltoff well before noon,” Kilda pointed out. “And Jadet will put cheese and bread in the saddlebags, in case.”

“If I —”

Kilda made her face as stern as Lady Synlake’s and looked down at the girl trotting along beside her. “You can’t come with me, Ifrith, no matter how helpful you are.”

“But mother —”

“Your mother told me to hurry. I can’t hurry with you and your pony and a the half-dozen guards your father would expect me to take to keep you safe, can I?”

“But mother said I could!”

Kilda stopped, and Ifrith skipped on a few steps and turned to look up at her. Her face was a picture of combined innocence and mute appeal. Long experience told Kilda that definitely meant Ifrith was up to something. “Did she?” Ifrith nodded. “Did she say, exactly, yes, Ifrith, you can ride to Faltoff with Kilda?”

“Um.” Ifrith kept that expression of transparently honestly, but Kilda could see the thoughts racing behind her eyes. “More or less.”

“Or did you say, Mother, can I go with Kilda, and she said yes thinking you meant _go with Kilda to the stables_?”

“ _I_ don’t know what she was thinking,” Ifrith said. “I can only pay attention to what she actually says, can’t I? That’s why father always says a lord should be very clear in his orders.”

Kilda stepped around Ifrith and headed for the stables again. “I don’t think that’s why, exactly.”

Ifrith hurried after her. “Father says a lord should never ask anyone to do something he isn’t willing to do himself!”

 “What does he say about preventing people from doing their jobs?”

A moment’s silence behind her and Kilda knew the shot had gone home. Ifrith had been on the receiving end of more than one of Lord Synlake’s stinging rebukes when she was younger for plaguing the stable-hands or the guards or the blacksmith or just about everyone else with her endless _ifs_.

Ifrith was difficult to repress for long, though. By the time Kilda had shouted for someone to bring the accumulated mail for Faltoff and begun to check Snail’s tack and hooves for herself, the little girl was back at her elbow. “I’d be _helping_ you!”

“By slowing me down?”

“If you lost the message,” Ifrith said, “then I could tell Vitian what was in it and that it really came from my mother!”

“She could,” agreed the stable-hand holding Snail’s head. He was grinning, and Kilda glared at him. He shrugged, not in the least daunted, and turned so Kilda could take the leather coat and sword-belt slung over his shoulder. 

She shrugged into the coat and fastened it. “I’ve never lost a message in my life.”

“First time for anything,” the stable-hand said, and Ifrith nodded vigorously.

“Anyway, that wouldn’t be helping, would it?” Kilda said. “Because then I’d know what’s in the message too, and you know better than that.” _I shall neither ask nor enquire_ , the oath of the Courier’s Guild said, _but carry safely all that is given to me to carry, from and to all persons, the contents unknown and the destination certain._  

“If I whispered it secretly in his ear you wouldn’t!” Ifrith countered.

Kilda closed her eyes and begged whichever of the gods it was who kept people from killing small and annoying children for patience. “Ifrith, you can’t come with me, unless your mother comes down here and directly _orders_ me to take you.”

Lady Synlake would do no such thing, Kilda knew. Ifrith also knew it, and fell silent. She looked down at her feet, poking the dirt with one small toe, and Kilda was almost sure she saw the glimmer of a tear on her face.

She sighed, and slung the sword-belt around her waist. “Look,” she said, buckling it. “Maybe next time, alright? I’ll ask your mother —”

The tear, if it had been there at all, vanished as if it had never been, and Ifrith flung her arms around Kilda’s waist. “Thank you, thank you, thank you Kilda! I’ll go and write a letter _right now_ so you’ll have something to take!”

And she was gone, pelting back across the courtyard on skinny legs, hair already well on the way to the tangle it always ended the day in.

“You walked into that one with your eyes open,” the stable-hand observed.

“Shut up,” Kilda told him, and swung up to Snail’s back.

 

 

She made good time. The roads were dry, as she’d mentioned to Lady Synlake, but at this time of year not heavily travelled. Kilda was able to keep Snail at a good brisk pace along the grassy verge and she rode down the long tunnel of Faltoff’s main gate well before the sun was directly overhead. 

The courier stables were just inside the gate. Kilda swung her leg over Snail’s neck and slid down, fishing her courier’s medallion out from inside her jerkin as she landed. Not that most people didn’t know her by sight, this close to Synlake, but manners were manners.

She fished the bundle of messages that had accumulated over the past few weeks out of her saddlebag and led Snail toward the stable.

Faltoff’s chief courier and guild-master, Egrith, was sitting on a bale of hay by the door, as thin and dry as a stick of straw herself. She’d been weathered to a leathery finish and as wiry and tough as one of the eastern horses she preferred when Kilda had been new to Synlake. The years since didn’t seem to have changed her at all. “After a remount?” she asked.

Kilda shook her head. “Bed for us both for the night.” She handed over the mail, except for Lady Synlake’s message safe inside her coat. Some was for people here in Faltoff, some bound further on, to be taken that way when a courier happened to be headed in the right direction. Lords and ladies could send a message and be sure it would reach its intended recipient within a week or most, even from Linkeep at the foot of the eastern ranges all the way to Goldharbour on Corvale’s southern coast. Kilda herself had made more than one such ride, trading off horses at every courier stables, a day and a night and another day in the saddle until a cloudy night and unfamiliar roads forced her to hand the message on to a local rider to take further.

He had, faithfully, as Kilda had known he would, as she herself would have if their positions had been reversed. They were Courier Guild, where-ever they lived, and their loyalty was to the guild and each other and to the message getting through, not to lords or ladies or even to the throne.

It was not, perhaps, quite as glamorous as belonging to the Association of Demon Hunters, with their long robes and tall staffs and stories of life-and-death duels to keep here safe from the Otherwhere. It was certainly harder and sweatier work than that of the Guild of Librarians, who spent their days at their desks where they carried out their sworn task of recording, faithfully and accurately, all that was told to them.

Still, it was something Kilda was proud of, the professional dedication and determined independence she was part of. If King Pethnir of Corvale himself had the temerity to ask a courier to hand over a message that wasn’t meant for him, that courier would refuse. If the Cross-Eyed Queen herself rose from the grave and appeared in sleepy little Faltoff to ask Kilda for Lady Synlake’s letter, she’d be bound to say no.

_Although if a royal ghost appeared to me, I have to admit, I_ _’d probably give it anything it wanted, and deal with the guild-masters later._

She left Snail in Egrith’s care and climbed the steep streets to the library, where she found Vitian, and gave him the message, directly into his hand as Lady Synlake had ordered.

If she’d had a curious bent, she might have wondered what would happen to it next. There would be a _next_ , Kilda was sure, because there was no reason a sane person could conceive for Lady Synlake to have a sudden urgent need to communicate with the nearest library in the middle of Mead Moon week. And that _next_ might very well have something to do with the fact that Faltoff, like every town with its own library that Kilda had ever been in, was built on a tall hill, and the library was at the very peak of it, with a tower rising above its roof to add even more height. 

She’d never been up that tower for herself, but she had a shrewd idea that from it, a person could look south and see the tower of the library of Sereville, or west to the tower of the library of Bowyer.

Kilda didn’t wonder and she didn’t speculate.

Nor did she envy Vitian, climbing all those stairs.


	2. Kilda: Mead Eve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kilda returns to Synlake Hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've done a little re-writing, including adding a whole new chapter 1, so this is a rewritten version of the old chapter one. All feedback gratefully received!

The brewers of Faltoff couldn’t hold a candle to those of Synlake Hall, and Kilda rose the next morning feeling considerably better than she had the day before.

She collected the messages bound for Synlake Hall or further north and tucked them into her saddlebags, along with a couple of honey-sweetened pastries and little cloth twist of dried berries from the night before. The treats might go some way toward reconciling Ifrith to having been left behind, although Kilda had little hope they’d distract her from Kilda’s impulsive promise to ask Lady Synlake to take the girl with her next time.

She could just imagine Lady Synlake’s face when she broached the subject. _Maybe I can put it off until Lord Synlake gets back._ Ifrith’s father might have just as little patience as her mother when the girl wasn’t where she was supposed to be, but he was much more likely to say yes to questions about a larger, stronger pony, proper lessons with sword and bow, or spending a night with the shepherds out at the sheep-fold. Kilda suspected that back in the days when Lord Synlake had been plain Jothnir, a red-haired under-grown younger son, he’d been fond of horses too big for him and nights under the stars himself.

Lord Synlake might not say yes, but he wouldn’t raise his eyebrows at Kilda just for asking the question.

But he was all the way down in Ceatertown in Corvale, like most of the lords of Belpond, summoned to King Pethnir’s great festival of thanks, and he wouldn’t be back for more than a week.

Kilda swung up into the saddle and turned Snail for the road home, wondering if she could persuade Ifrith to wait that long. _Probably yes, if I point out that her mother will say no and her father might, possibly, say yes._ Ifrith had enough determination for two or three fully-grown adults crammed into her tiny frame, but she was also clever enough to know the good sense of maximising her chances.

_For example, she asked_ me _to take her with me, rather than Andrith or Petrin._

So she would wait until Lord Synlake returned from spending Mead Moon in Ceatertown, giving thanks for King Pethnir’s victory over the invaders and ten years of peace.

That was despite the fact that in Belpond the victory and the peace had not seemed to make much difference. The Snakkinen still raided south and east over the border. The lords and ladies of Belpond still kept their walls and keeps in good repair and still required every man and woman able to hold a spear or an axe to give eighty days service a year under arms.

And Belpond’s throne still supported the aged and withered arse of Nedrith of Gyrdale, installed and kept there by the threat of Snakkinen swords.

 The only difference Kilda had been able to see was that after every year’s raids the kings of Eadie and Yenlake sent messages to Nedrith’s court claiming that they were the work of hot-headed young warriors who’d acted without permission, and who of course would be severely punished for their disobedience.

Nedrith pretended to believe them, because he had no choice, and King Pethnir pretended to believe that Nedrith believed them, because despite his five famous battles and five famous victories, King Pethnir didn’t have enough men to fight Eadie and Yenlake and Belpond all at once.  Meanwhile the Snakkinen went on stealing what they could, wealth, food and slaves, and the men and women of Belpond went on killing every Snakkinen they saw.

Not in the Mead Moon, though, and so Kilda let Snail pick his own pace homeward. After all, none of the messages in her saddlebag were urgent. Her helmet was rammed over her dark hair, she rode in her armour of a leather coat with iron plates sewn into the lining and she kept her hand close to her sword, but it was Mead Moon and so she really wasn’t expecting to be attacked. Not now, at the height of summer, well before harvest time. War came in autumn, when people could be spared from the fields and when there were fat granaries and plump beasts to plunder. Not spring, or summer, when even the Snakkinen had fields to sow and crops to tend. Not winter, when Sirt could open his white hands and smother an army in snow.

_Wolf Moon for Hunger, Blood Moon for War_ , the children’s rhyme said, and that had been true for all of Kilda’s twenty-three years, and so the watch she kept on the spinney of trees to her right and the crest of the hill on her left was only habit. If a glint of metal or the shadow of a movement that was more than the wind showed in either place, one hard kick would send Snail down the road at a speed no horse in Belpond could match, but Kilda didn’t expect it would be necessary. She kept a little more alert to the oily brush of a demon against her mind, because demons didn’t tend fields or steal harvests and so had little regard for the time of year, but demons were drawn to people, and the likelihood of finding one here where there was nothing to prey on but the occasional shepherd or woodcutter was remote. She had her crystal, hung on a chain around her neck, just in case, but she didn’t expect to need it any more than she might need Snail’s sudden turn of speed.

She didn’t. Snail ambled past the hill and around the long curve of the road that marked two-thirds of the journey between Faltoff and Synlake Hall.

_Wolf Moon for Hunger, Blood Moon for War. What you sow in the Seed Moon brings the wolf to the door. Hare Moon brings rains for the rivers and lakes, and when the Hare Moon_ _’s done dying, the Lady awakes._

The Lady’s Moon was well past, now, though, the day before the full of the Mead Moon. In Kilda’s opinion, Mead Moon was the best holiday of the year, and not just because Synlake’s brew-house enjoyed a small but well-deserved local fame for the fineness of its beer. In the spring, there was always the gnawing uncertainty of that year’s growing weather; at harvest, the knowledge that the next months would bring raids and fighting and some of those around the fires wouldn’t see another year. At midwinter, the long months of cold and rationing loomed ahead. The Mead Moon, though, the Mead Moon was unshadowed, although this year would be a smaller feast at Synlake, presided over by Synlake’s lady rather than its lord.

The sun was lowering toward the western plains when Kilda reached the river Syn. It ran slow and low at this time of the year, curving around the hill of Synlake Hall and emptying into the lake beyond. The slope down to the ford was churned up by many hooves, farmers bringing beasts in for slaughter for the festival a few days early, and Kilda held Snail to a slow walk as they crossed and climbed the other side. On the sounder footing of the dry road again, she pressed her heels to his side for the first time that day. It had been a long ride, even if a slow one, and Snail responded willingly. _As eager for his bed and his dinner as I am._

Then he tossed his head and snorted and in the same instant Kilda smelled smoke.

Without hesitating, she sent him off the road and into a copse of trees, for whatever fragile cover they might provide.

Smoke from the cooking fires, even as hard as the kitchens worked in Mead Week, shouldn’t carry this far. Not without a stronger wind than the breeze that ruffled the leaves above Kilda’s head.

_Someone careless in the kitchens, maybe. A fire, a bad one —_ except she couldn’t hear an alarm bell clamouring through the late afternoon.

It was the Mead Moon, the season of peace, but the prickling instinct of _danger_ that tightened Kilda’s stomach and quickened her pulse at the smell of that smoke drifting across the quiet meadow that sloped up to Synlake Hall’s great gates.

She slid down from the saddle and crept forward to the edge of the copse, the last few yards on her belly. She could see the smoke now, rising in sullen clouds above Synlake’s palisade wall, but there wasn’t a sound to accompany it — no shouted orders to fetch water or save the contents of the storehouse, no screams, no distant clatter of running feet or buckets against the stone lip of the well.

The gates stood open, both leaves of them, giving Kilda a glimpse of a sliver of the courtyard within. She counted a slow thirty without seeing even a flicker of movement. There were no guards on the top of the gatehouse, either, and there should have been, even if the main hall itself was burning.

Unquestionably, something terrible had happened. Just as unquestionably, though, whatever had happened was over now. The air was not just empty of the sounds of the people of Synlake trying to fight the fire, but empty of the clash of weapons and the screams of men and women fighting and dying. No sound of victorious warriors tearing through the hold in search of plunder, no wails of captives facing a future of slavery.

Kilda glanced back over her shoulder to where Snail stood obediently waiting. She was stationed at Synlake Hall, but she was Courier Guild. Her duty lay to the Guild, and her duty was clear. First to ride hard for the nearest warning beacon and fire it, alerting the countryside — and any other couriers who saw it — that raiders were about.

_But those beacons should already be burning_. They should have been burning days ago. Snakkinen raiding bands moved fast, but they shouldn’t have been able to cross the border and reach this far south without _someone_ seeing them. That was the point of the beacons. They were a warning that could leap from hill to hill as fast as a hand could tip a firepot of smoldering embers into a pile of brushwood. Smoke by day, a blaze of flame by night, sending people across the country running to seize their valuables and start herding their livestock into the safety of the nearest stronghold.

The slow, the careless, those who’d taken the risk of living too far from a fort or walled town — they still suffered. For the majority, though, the beacons gave time to get to safety, just as the walls and palisades that ringed the towns, halls, and forts of Belpond protected the stored harvest.

In all Kilda’s life, the beacons had never failed.

She lay smelling smoke and listening to silence and tried to tell herself that there was a first time for everything. A first time for a Snakkinen raid this early in the year, a first time for them to get three days ride into Belpond without rousing any sort of alarm, a first time for guards chosen and trained by Lord Synlake himself to fail to see a horde of howling barbarians racing for the gates up that long, steep, open hill in time to get the gates closed.

_Gates that can be closed by a counterweight by no more than kicking a stone off the top of the wall._

Sweat crawled down her face and trickled icy down her spine.

The gates were open, and the beacon fires hadn’t been lit, and it was the Mead Moon, and all of those things told her that the Snakkinen hadn’t done this.

A demon had.

A demon strong enough to overcome Synlake Hall’s own demon hunter, which meant it would brush aside the feeble protection of Kilda’s crystal the way a warhorse crashed through a cobweb.

Kilda clutched that crystal and watched the silent walls and told herself that no-one could be alive inside, that she could, that she _should_ , ride away and take the news to the Guild that every man and woman of Synlake was dead and be certain it was the truth.

Then she got to her feet and walked stiffly back to Snail, mounted up and turned his head uphill.

Towards the walls, towards the smoke, towards to the catastrophe that had consumed Synlake and wouldn’t even need to pause before consuming her too.

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Kilda: Death and Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kilda searches for answers.

 

Snail’s ears worked back and forth furiously as Kilda rode him up to the gate, his skin alive with twitches and shivers. Kilda clutched her crystal harder, although she knew Snail’s nervousness had nothing to do with sensing whatever demon there might be within the walls. Demons and horses were indifferent to each other, like demons and dogs, like demons and all other animals.

Demons were only interested in humans, and only humans ever knew they were there, or so the stories said.

_Although humans usually only know they_ _’re there too late to do anything useful about it_. The stories said that too.

Snail was nervous because his rider was terrified, and because like his rider he could smell death as well as smoke as they reached the gate.

He was nervous but he was a fine, brave horse and he trusted his rider, and because she wanted to go forward, he carried her under the arch of the gate and into the courtyard although his ears told Kilda he considered it a thoroughly bad idea.

Kilda couldn’t argue with that.

In the courtyard, death was everywhere.

For all the smoke, not as much of the fort had burned as Kilda would have thought. The storehouses, all of them, their contents still smoldering and belching gusts of sour fumes. The brew-house beside them had caught as well, and was little more than a skeleton of black beams stinking of scorched hops.

The rest of the buildings were intact, untouched, seeming so normal that the bodies sprawled everywhere looked for a heart-beat like one of Lord Synlake’s drills. _You won_ _’t come through a real fight without anyone getting a scratch_ , he always said, and so every drill included some of the defenders falling, hindering their comrades, forcing decisions between helping a wounded friend and holding the line of spears on the wall.

Then Snail shifted a step and swished his tail and flies rose buzzing from the nearest body and it couldn’t possibly be a drill at all.

Kilda clung to the pommel and breathed through her mouth and tried to make sense of what she was looking at.

Between Snail’s flicking ears she could see bodies sprawled across the dirt between the gate and the great hall, hacked down and left where they lay. On the stairs up to the gate house on her left, the bodies of the guards she had expected to see from her vantage point near the ford. One had an arrow in his chest. The others were drenched in blood with gaping wounds left by swords or axes.

To her right, in front of the church —

“Lady’s blessing. Lady’s blessing,” Kilda said desperately, blinking furiously as her eyes burned and her vision blurred.

To her right, in front of the church, small bodies, heaped in a careless pile.  Crows had found them already, as they’d found the rest of the bodies. One turned to regard Kilda with a bright black eye, and then dismissed her as a threat and turned back to feasting on the dead.

_Someone had the time and the presence of mind to ring the bell_. The bell, that hadn’t sounded in more than a drill for all the time Kilda had been assigned to ride for Synlake Hall, to tell everyone inside the palisade that the walls could no longer protect them. To warn everyone capable of wielding a weapon, whether a pitchfork or a kitchen knife, to seize it.

To warn everyone who couldn’t, the very old, the infirm, and they very young, to hide themselves. To hide themselves in the crypt beneath the church, if they could reach it.

The crypt was the safest place in Synlake Hall, a stone basement beneath a stone building with a trapdoor that looked like every other flagstone unless you knew where to put your fingers to find the handle.

The children had run for it, for safety, and either they hadn’t reached it in time or they’d been down there, all down there together, and together they’d been dragged out and butchered by the door of what was supposed to be their refuge.

Possibly dragged out and butchered by their mothers and fathers, their older siblings. If not by their own families, then certainly by people they’d known all their short lives. That’s what all the stories said demons did, the powerful ones anyway.

Small ones whispered, fanned doubts already there about a lover’s constancy or a retainer’s loyalty. They started arguments and turned arguments into fights. Under a small demon’s influence, a mother irritated by a disobedient child might strike out with a closed fist instead of an open hand.

This, though, this pile of little corpses, no small demon could do that. The bloody scene within Synlake’s walls was something out of the old stories of the Demon Wars, of the days before the Demon Guild and the Demon Hunters, the days when the Cross-Eyed Queen had watched her country and her army torn apart.

A great demon, one of the princes of the Other Court, of the kind that hadn’t been seen in Kilda’s lifetime. One of those could do this.

Kilda couldn’t feel any trace of demon taint in the air, but then, she was no hunter. Imps, the sort of small demons her crystal could protect against, imps gave themselves away to anyone with the presence of mind to look for them. Imps tasted like rancid oil at the back of the throat, felt like a knife held askew on the grinding wheel. Imps were the small irritation that strung the nerves tight and made even the smallest slight an unbearable provocation.

Great demons, though, they were supposed to be able to conceal themselves from everyone except those particularly trained to detect them, everyone but the Demon Guild. A great demon could be right in front of Kilda at this very moment, coiling silent and invisible in the acrid air, or right beside her, or right above her preparing to pounce, to drive itself deep into her mind and tear her self and soul apart.

_Or it could be long gone_.

Kilda closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth and told herself that either way, there was nothing she could do about it.

When she swung her leg over Snail’s neck and slid to the ground her knees almost buckled. She hung on to Snail’s mane with one hand and clutched her crystal with the other, waiting for the wave of weakness to pass.

Ifrith would be in that sad huddle of small bodies and Kilda knew she had to go and find her. Had to make sure of what she already knew, for Lord Synlake. Not because she owed him that duty — she owed no one any duty but the guild. _Because he_ _’s a father, and no father should be left to wonder if perhaps, perhaps, just_ perhaps _his child had still been alive, for a while, needing help, for a while_ _…_

But Kilda couldn’t bring herself to go over to it, not yet. She picked her way through the sprawled bodies toward the main hall, instead. Lady Synlake’s body would be somewhere there, probably close to the hall steps. She would probably have been inside the hall itself when the demon first struck. Lady Synlake was almost always inside the hall, hearing from Synlake’s advisers, dispensing justice, giving instructions and calculating taxes and tariffs and how much grain would feed how many mouths and how many spears and swords were needed to fend off that year’s likely raids. Lady Synlake might be good with a spear and better with a bow, but she would have been unarmed inside the hall and so she wouldn’t have lasted long in the screaming chaos the demon had caused. She would be in the hall, or near it.

In fact, Kilda found her on the steps themselves, next to the body of Taernth, Synlake Hall’s demon hunter. The head of his staff was crusted with blood, strands of red hair stuck in the mess. Lady Synlake had found a spear from somewhere, and it was still clutched in her hand, the point half-sheared off and tipped with blood. She had struck a powerful blow, breaking the head of the spear against someone’s mail and still managing to drive through and draw blood.

It had not been enough to save her, though. The shafts of three arrows stood up from her chest, one buried deep enough to leave only a hand’s width of shaft between her bloodstained tunic and the arrow’s grey feathers. Her mouth was open as if she’d died in the act of crying out in protest, or shouting a command.

Kilda knelt and unfolded Lady Synlake’s fingers from the spear’s shaft. Her hand was cold and her death grip ferocious, and after a few moments Kilda was forced to grit her teeth and break the dead woman’s fingers to open her hand.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” she said, and tugged the iron ring with its square-cut seal from Lady Synlake’s thumb, to give to her husband as proof his wife was dead. 

There was nothing for it then, but to face the pile of corpses that had been the children of Synlake when Kilda had ridden out yesterday morning. Some of them had run out the gate behind her, calling requests for her to bring back sugared pastry or almond paste or some other small treat that only a town could provide. Githri would be there, his ambition to be a courier like Kilda gone forever. Amdra, the blacksmith’s daughter, and Fillia, her best friend. Terlin and Jadren, both big and little Sanlac …

And Ifrith, _if if if_ Ifrith. _Ifrith, who would be alive if I_ _’d pretended to believe her when she said she had her mother’s permission to come with me._

Kilda couldn’t bring herself to look at the pile of bodies as she got closer to it. She kept her eyes firmly on the ground, as if her life depended on finding firm footing for every step. Over a half-severed arm, past a woman with her guts spilling out between the fingers clutched to her stomach, around an archer whose quiver spilled a dozen unused arrows into the pool of blood around his head, their yellow fletching turned red by the …

_Their yellow fletching_.

That was Synlake’s fletching, yellow and white. So yes, one of Synlake’s archers should have a quiver of arrows with yellow feathers.

And none of them would have grey-feathered arrows to put to their bow.

“Belnir’s bloody sword!” Kilda spun on her heel and strode back to the hall steps. There was the spear with the broken tip, lying next to Lady Synlake’s hand, but not a single body near her was in armour. None of Synlake’s people were, except the gate-guards — who all lay where they’d fallen, on the steps to the gatehouse, clear across the courtyard.

  _And why does Taernth have blood on his staff?_ Possible, yes, that he’d been struck down by someone under a demon’s influence as he tried to cage and contain it, but who had he struck in turn? When she examined them, none of the bodies near him had a head-wound.

Kilda had limited experience as a soldier, for a woman of Belpond, which meant she was the veteran of two pitched battles, four desultory sieges and a dozen frantic skirmishes. She was quite certain that whoever had taken that blow from Taernth’s staff, a blow hard enough to leave the staff splattered with blood and worse, hadn’t been able to go far, not under their own power.

Whoever Taernth had struck had been carried away, and they had probably been carried away by men and women wearing mail and carrying grey-fletched arrows.

_These people didn_ _’t do this to each other. It was done_ to _them._

Which meant no demon had visited Synlake. This was ordinary, human violence.

Kilda straightened, and turned slowly on her heel. “Is anyone alive?” she shouted. “Make a noise, so I can find you!”

Silence.

_Someone_ must have survived. A demon, a great demon, could have drawn every living soul in Synlake to a frenzy of murder, but an attack? _Even with no alarm, some would run. Some would hide. And there must have been time for the bell to toll, because why else would all the children by by the church?_

“Hello?” she called again.

Still no answer. _They_ _’ve fled to the woods._

_That_ _’s what I’d do, if I’d lived through this._

Kilda drew her belt-knife and hacked through the shaft of one of the arrows that had killed Lady Synlake. She tucked it and its grey fletching inside her jerkin, beside the messages she had carried back from Faltoff for the dead. Evidence for Lord Synlake, his dead wife’s ring and the arrow that had killed her.

Then she ran up the stairs to the great hall.

The doors were closed, but when she tugged them they moved. They hadn’t been barred against intruders, but only swung shut by their own weight. Kilda hauled one leaf open and stepped into the gloom inside. “Hello? Hello! It’s Kilda!”

Any torches or candles that had been lit had burned out, and the long hall was in darkness except for what little of the fading afternoon light struggled through the high windows. Kilda stood still, and blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust. “Hello?”

There were people there, she realised, at the other end of the room, watching her silently. Some in chairs, some standing against the wall. She took a step forward, waiting for them to move, to speak, but they did neither. _Survivors?_

_Or an ambush_?

She put her hand on the hilt of her sword. “Speak up!”

Not a sound.

She edged toward the wall, not daring to look away. Her shoulder brushed against the carved bulging belly of Baneston, bringer of famine, and she flinched away, hoping it wasn’t any kind of omen. Danebach, Baneston’s twin, was far above with his sickle and his apple.

He and the other Gods Above were too high up for Kilda to make them out. She had only the Gods Below, staring silent at her: Baneston, arms and legs like twigs, cheeks hollow with hunger and stomach swollen with a child that wouldn’t live to be born; Tristith with icicles clustered in her hair; Drowned Niamar, who brought the floods; and Arkineth, his lips cracked from the thirst caused by the droughts he himself inflicted on the land.

Kilda wanted to pray to their kinder twins, far above her, or to Belnir of the Bloody Sword, or even to Shonia of the hearth, but the words slipped through her mind and vanished without reaching her lips. Synlake Hall was the domain of the Gods Below, now, the Gods Below and the Lady between.

She drew her sword and took one more step forward, past Niamar’s bulging eyes —

And saw the figures at the end of the hall clearly.

Her stomach twisted and bile flooded her mouth. She coughed and spat and managed somehow to stay on her feet, gaze nailed to the twisted figures at the end of the hall.

Some people _had_ run, some _had_ hidden, but whoever had come to Synlake in mail coats with grey-fletched arrows had found them. Found grey-haired Maric, who tended the hounds, found one-handed Tythan from the kitchens, found Keithia who swept the floors and cleaned the hearths and would cheerfully bend to any task with a will, as long as it was explained to her in simple words.

Found them all.

Found them, and killed them, and not quickly.

Kilda forced herself to walk all the way along the hall, forced herself to look at what had been done to Maric and Tythan and all the rest. Five of the bodies were horribly mutilated, eyes gouged out, limbs with strips of skin and flesh hanging loose.

The final two were unmarked except for gaping wounds to their throats.

If it hadn’t been for those last two bodies, Kilda might have been tempted to think that the attackers who’d devastated Synlake Hall had been members of the long-dead cult of Nyx. Those worshippers, though, with their obscene rites of blood and pain, had been driven out of Belpond — as well as Corvale, and Yenlake, and all civilised places — more than a hundred years ago, when Kilda’s own people had first crossed the sea from the south and found the land polluted by the disgusting cult. If any of them survived, the people of Nyx, as anything more than a tendency to dark hair in some villages, they hadn’t been seen by reliable witnesses in decades.

And the people of Nyx might have rejoiced in torture, but they certainly wouldn’t have given a quick and merciful death to any prisoner.

The torture had been for a reason. _They wanted something from them_. _Wanted to know something._

And once the invaders had forced that information from one or the other of their prisoners, they’d killed the rest quickly, and left.

_The children._ Ifrith and the others hadn’t been lured out by a demon’s call, but betrayed in the extremity of pain by one of Synlake’s people not lucky enough to find a quick death in the courtyard.

Kilda searched through the rest of the hall and the rooms that led from it, but there were no more bodies, and no survivors. Back in the courtyard, she checked the stables, the kennels, the blacksmith and wainwright’s, and found more bodies, including those of the dogs, but that was all. The horses were gone, along with a good proportion of Synlake Hall’s tack. Everything else was dead.

_They were thorough_. Kilda knelt by the body of one of the stable-hands, sprawled face down in the straw by the stable’s side-door. He’d been run through from the back, and there wasn’t a weapon in his hands or near him, not even a shovel or a hoof-pick. _Running in panic, no threat, but they chased him down and killed him._

_Him, and every other possible witness to what they did._ They’d even slaughtered Synlake’s hounds, although even a dog as clever as Rayouf couldn’t have told Kilda any more than the grey-fletched arrows and the broken bodies already had.  _Slaughtered at some risk to themselves_ , _too._ Two of the hounds had blood on their massive muzzles. They’d gone down fighting and they’d left their mark on their murderers. 

If someone had been willing to linger so long inside a fort they’d just watered with its occupants’ blood, they’d had good reason to do so.  Finding the children, yes, probably because one of those children was Ifrith, Synlake’s heir and like her father, once of the electors for the crown. But as well as finding the children, killing everyone who’d seen them, too.

Killing the dogs.

_Because the dogs are witnesses, too._ They couldn’t have told Kilda who’d done this, but they’d have known the scent of whoever had harmed their people. And it was no over-the-border raiders who’d done this. It was someone the people of Synlake had known and could name, someone afraid that one day they’d come across one of Synlake’s hounds running at Lord Synlake’s stirrup and the dog would know them.

If Lady Synlake hadn’t had a message too urgent to wait until after the end of Mead Moon week, Kilda would have seen the attackers for herself, would have recognised them.

_In the few moments before I died, like everybody else._

And if she hadn’t realised the importance of those grey-fletched arrows, or hadn’t forced herself to come into the silent, smoking fort at all, she’d have been rousing the countryside to watch for Snakkinen raiders who didn’t exist, or riding south with fearful tales of a demon that had never been.

_It has to be one of our Belpond lords_. Raiders from Eadie or Yenlake, even without the tacit approval of their kings, wouldn’t need to fear recognition. All Snakkinen warriors looked more or less alike to their victims — tattooed faces, dark hair, strings around their necks where the finger-bones of those they’d killed hung and rattled.

Kilda checked the nearest body, then the next. Both had all of their fingers. _No, definitely not Snakkinen._

Whoever it had been had ridden through the open gates of the fort. They’d been let in — but the children had gone to the crypt, which meant that someone, and that someone was almost certainly Lady Synlake, had not quite trusted them, had set the alarm bell ringing. But she’d had to let the visitors in, trusted or not, which again meant it had been the men of one of Belpond’s lords. _Maybe Nedrith_ _’s men, even_. Someone she didn’t dare offend.

And Lord Synlake was at King Pethnir’s court in Ceatertown, along with every single one of the people who had the men and the motive for this slaughter.

He had to know, and quickly. _His own life might be in danger, and him not knowing to watch out for a knife in the dark._

Egrith would send a message south as soon as Kilda told her what had happened, to the Guild if nowhere else. Kilda fingered Lady Synlake’s ring in her pocket and wondered if she dared fold a parchment, seal it, and claim it was Lady Synlake’s last message to her husband and must urgently be delivered.

That it was a crime, and would be the end of her career as a courier, was a disincentive. What really made up Kilda’s mind against it was the thought of going back into the Great Hall and searching among those battered bodies for Lady Synlake’s ink-block and sealing wax.

_I_ _’ll beg Egrith to send_ me _with the message to the Guild in Ceatertown. There_ _’s no rule that says I can’t pass a few moments in conversation with Lord Synlake while I’m there._

First, though, Kilda knew she had one more thing to be sure of. Reluctantly, she made her way back across the courtyard to the church.

One by one, she lifted the bodies of the children, studied their faces, and laid them aside. It seemed wrong to pile them on top of each other, but there were so many dead thronged in the courtyard that there wasn’t enough space to lay them decently out. In the end she carried them into the church itself.

The long windowless building was dark, the torches unlit in the brackets on the walls. Kilda laid the first body down by the door and touched the nearest torch. Her fingers felt fresh cloth, and the oil it had been soaked in wasn’t fully dry.   Death had come to Synlake in daylight, and today.

She wrenched the torch free and went across the courtyard to light it from the smoldering ruins of the nearest storehouse.

Once she’d touched flame to the other torches in the church, she could see that the trapdoor down to the crypt had been dragged aside. Mother Annalise lay sprawled beside it. A thick blood-trail led from near the door to her body, and sprays of blood marked the walls and columns. Her throat had been cut, and from the blood Kilda thought she’d taken the wound in the first seconds she confronted the intruders. Taken the wound, and fought on, dying, an old woman with grey hair and knees that troubled her when the rains of the Hare Moon came fighting to defend the children in her care.

Kilda straightened her body, folding the gnarled hands with their torn fingernails across the cleric’s chest, threading the string of amber beads that marked Mother Annalise’s office through her fingers.

Then she went back to looking through the pile of little corpses for Ifrith.

There were boys, there were girls, there were even girls with hair the same startling shade of bronze that Ifrith shared with her father, in their case legacy of some long-ago royalty with a wandering eye.

Kilda recognised them all, and none of them was Ifrith.

_If Ifrith hadn_ _’t been in the crypt …_ but where else would she be? Dodging the occasional lesson was one thing, usually spurred by Ifrith’s conviction that she knew better than Tearnth what she should be learning, but she took important things seriously enough.

Only last Midwinter she’d lit the candles in the church on behalf of her father, who’d looked on with sober pride as Ifrith had recited the ritual words in a clear, unwavering voice. _We thank Sirt Whitehanded for his restraint in this time of storms. We thank Belnir and his bloody knife for victory over those who wish us ill. We thank the Lady for her blessing, and Danbanach OneEye for our harvest_ _…_ on and on, through all of the gods, word perfect and unhesitating.

And when she’d turned from the altar, she’d fixed a couple of gossipping guardsmen with a glare that could have curdled milk as it foamed fresh from the cow’s udder. Back in her seat beside her father, Ifrith hadn’t made a sound, herself, hadn’t even swung her feet where they dangled beneath her, hadn’t even glanced aside from Mother Annalise.

Kilda went down the first few steps. “Ifrith? Ifrith, are you still here?” She paused to listen, but no little voice answered her. “Ifrith, it’s me, it’s Kilda. They’re gone, the ones who wanted to hurt you. You can come out, it’s safe.”

Silence.

 Listening to the silence in the crypt, Kilda didn’t think the girl was even there. _I missed her body, somehow, that_ _’s all. She’s dead. I’ll check the children again and I’ll find her._

_Or she_ _’s not dead, but she’s not here either, because whoever did this carried her off to use as a hostage against her father, or King Pethnir, or both._

Kilda held the torch out and turned slowly from side to side. The crypt was empty. No small child huddled behind one of the stone tombs, no living eyes reflected torchlight from one of the niches in the wall. The ones with the grey-fletched arrows had been thorough, and they had dragged every child hiding here up into the courtyard and cut their throats. Ifrith was dead, and if she wasn’t, she was a hostage and beyond Kilda’s rescue.

Still, the back of her neck prickled with the feeling that she was not alone.

“Ifrith, I know you’re frightened. I’m frightened too. I know you were hiding down here with Amdra and Fillia and Terlin and both Sanlacs and the others. I know someone found you, and took the others away. And I think you know they hurt them.” At least some of those children would have managed to scream, and the gods only knew what the bloody business in the courtyard had sounded like to the children cowering down here. “I know it must seem like the safest thing, to stay down here, but Ifrith, lots of people are dead, and nobody’s coming to help until I can get a message to your father and bring him back here, and that’s weeks, and I tell him I left his daughter here alone, can I? I’d have to stay here with you, which means Lord Synlake won’t find out what happened here until he comes back next month, and Ifrith, I don’t want to stay here until next month, because in case I forgot to mention it, I’m Kilda the Coward and I’m absolutely terrified right now.”

There was a low grating sound and Kilda nearly jumped out of her skin. Heart hammering, she drew her sword and forced herself to hold the torch higher. Its flickering light wavered even more with the shaking of her hand. “Show yourself!”

The words came out thin and weak, a plea rather than a command, but the sound came again. It was coming from the back of the crypt, and the hair on the back of Kilda’s neck rose as the top of one of the stone coffins tilted back. “Ifrith?”

A head rose from the coffin, not, not a head, a _skull_ , some shreds of dried flesh still clinging to the bone and wisps of hair trailing from parts of the scalp. Kilda stared at it and tried to pray but her mouth was dry and her mind was blank. The dead of Synlake were rising to take revenge for the living …

Then the skull toppled over the edge of the coffin and the dark-haired peddler Kilda had last seen sleeping off his hangover on the Great Hall steps vaulted after it, landing with his feet in a tangle of winding cloth and old bones.

“You’d better be who you say you are,” he said, showing her the knife in his hand. With one toe, he rocked the skull back and forth on the floor. “Because if you try to hurt me, I’ll kill you as dead as Synlake’s grandfather here.”


	4. Kilda: From The Tomb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kilda makes a new acquaintance, and finds an old one.

 

Kilda found her voice. “I won’t hurt you,” she said. When she tried to sheathe her sword, her hands were trembling badly enough for it to take three tries to get the tip of the blade into the scabbard. Finally she managed it, and rammed the steel home. “What are you doing down here?”

The peddler ran his fingers through his lank hair, dislodging a small shower of debris that Kilda really didn’t want to contemplate. “You first,” he said. “I could hear what was happening, up there. How are you alive? Were you working with them? Were you the one who let them in?”

“No!” Kilda said, startled. “Is that how they got in? Someone let them through the gates?”

He shrugged. “They must have. I was asleep in the church. I heard the bell ringing, then all the littlies came pelting in and down here. It seemed like a good idea to follow them. I heard the shouting almost before I got down the stairs. I don’t think they could have breached the wall that fast, no matter how many they had.”

“It wasn’t me,” Kilda said. “I wasn’t here. I’ve been to Faltoff and back.” She hooked her courier’s medallion out of her shirt for him to see. “Do you want to see the messages I’ve brought back?”

“If you were clever, you could fake those.”

Kilda tucked the medallion away again. “Why would I let an enemy through the gates?”

“Money,” he said flatly.

“There’s not enough gold and silver in the world to be worth it. Where would I go to spend it, Winterfold? The Mountains of Nyx? Even the Snakkinen would cut my throat as an oathbreaker and not even bother to take my bones.”

“Not with —”

“Faked letters that’d prove my guilt the moment someone thought to ask the senders?” Frustration sharpened her tone but it also cleared some of the fog of dull horror that had settled over her at the sight of the courtyard full of dead. _What if they come back to make sure they finished the job?_ Or someone else coming to see what the smoke was, looking for a few easy pickings from the dead … _Someone who_ _’d make short work of me._

“If you’re working _for_ the Snakkinen, they wouldn’t kill you,” the peddler pointed out.

“Snakkinen didn’t do this,” Kilda said.

He shook his head. “I _heard_ them —”

“There are too many bodies up there with too many fingers. Come up and look for yourself.” He still regarded her with narrowed eyes, and Kilda’s patience, stretched as thin as her nerves, snapped. “Belnir’s bloody knife, if I wanted to hurt you I’d have done it by now! I could run you through before you could even _try_ to get that little knife through my armour.”

He lowered the knife a little, gaze considering. “That’s a point in your favour,” he conceded.

“ _Thank_ you.” Kilda looked around the crypt again. “When you came down here, was Ifrith — the Lord’s daughter — here then?”

“And why would you want to know that?” he countered.

 “Because — look, what’s your name?”

He paused, and then said, “Tait.”

Kilda was almost sure he was lying, but she couldn’t bring herself to give a rat’s tail about it. _On today_ _’s scales, it’s about the weight of a cobweb_. “Because, Tait, I couldn’t find her body upstairs and I looked for it, and I’ve got to tell her father what happened to her.  Did you see her? Did they take her with them?”

He shook his head, but his eyes flicked back towards the stone coffin he’d climbed from. “I didn’t —”

Kilda put her hand to the hilt of her sword. “Step away from that tomb,” she said quietly.

“Now look —” he started to say, raising his hands a little.

Kilda drew an inch or so of steel from her scabbard and Tait fell silent. He took a step away from the tomb. Kilda shifted her grip on her sword hilt, and he took another. She edged past him, holding the torch between them, and risked looking away from him long enough to glance into the coffin.

Ifrith’s copper hair caught the light of the torch and blazed like candle-flames against the dark grey stone.

Kilda jerked her attention back to Tait. “Ifrith,” she said. “Ifrith!”

The girl didn’t answer.

“She’s not hurt,” Tait said.

Kilda ignored him. Taking her hand from her sword, she reached behind her and down until she felt a small arm. When she shook it gently, she could feel Ifrith’s body moving limply. Her heart seemed to turn to a lump of ice in her chest. _I_ _’m too late. Oh, Iffy, I’m sorry._

In the next heartbeat she realised that Ifrith’s skin was warm. Kilda slid her hand down to find the girl’s slender wrist, found a pulse there, and felt her own heart begin to beat again. “What did you do to her?”

“A potion. It’s harmless, I swear.  If they came back — if they hadn’t left — I didn’t want her to make a noise. She was crying. Not loud, but still, she was crying. I just gave her a potion, just so she’d sleep and they wouldn’t find her, I swear it!” Tait’s voice held the ring of truth that had been absent when he’d given his name. Still, Kilda didn’t discount the possibility that he’d also been thinking about a reward for presenting Lord Synlake with his daughter and a claim to have saved her life.

_A reward, or a ransom._

She couldn’t lift Ifrith out of the tomb without turning her back on Tait. She couldn’t hold the torch and the child and still have a hand free for her sword. _Time to choose_. _Trust him or not?_

_Kill him or not?_

“Hold the torch,” she said at last, holding it out to him. When Tait had taken it, Kilda reached down into the narrow coffin and gathered Ifrith’s limp form up. She half-expected Tait to take advantage of her turned back and either run or try and stab her, but he didn’t. Kilda hoisted the sleeping child up and settled her on one hip, freeing her sword-hand again. “Alright. Upstairs. You first.”

Tait didn’t move. “Are you sure they’re gone?”

“Well and truly,” Kilda assured him. “And we should be likewise, before the smoke attracts scavengers with swords instead of wings.”

He paled a little and gulped audibly, the torchlight wavering with the tremor in his hand. Kilda had to shove his shoulder to get him moving towards the stairs. 

At the top of the stairs he stopped stone still again, staring at the children’s bodies laid out along the aisle. “They laid them out.”

Kilda shoved him again, towards the door. “I did that. I was looking for this one.”

“Why did they kill them all?” Tait asked in a whisper. “Children couldn’t have fought them. They were all hiding.”

“To be sure of killing the lord’s little daughter, I’m guessing,” Kilda said, hoisting Ifrith a little higher on her shoulder. 

Tait shook his head. He pointed to one of the bodies, a girl only a year or so short of grown with long bronze hair like Ifrith’s own. _Maegrith,_ Kilda recognised. “That girl told them _she_ was Ifrith. When the Snakkinen — or whoever — came down the stairs, they said they just wanted Ifrith and the others would be taken to their parents. That girl stood up and said she was Ifrith. So why kill the others?”

“So no-one would be able to say what they did, or what they looked like, or who they were,” Kilda said. “They even killed the hounds, just in case. Move it, man, I want to get out of here before Ifrith wakes up.”

“And go where?” Tait asked.

“Away,” Kilda said shortly. _As if I_ _’ll tell you where we’re bound._ Peddlers were travellers by their very trade, and Tait might know that Faltoff held the closest courier’s stables of any size. If he didn’t, Kilda was content to let him guess.

She shouldered past him and began to pick her way across the courtyard toward Snail, still standing obediently, if uneasily, where she’d left him with his reins looped around the rail of the stairs that led up to the walk on the top of the palisade.

Tait trailed behind her. “I have to find my packs. Everything I own — I have to find them.”

“Then go look.” Kilda realised she couldn’t mount with Ifrith cradled on her hip. She was loath to give the girl to Tait to hold. _I_ _’ll put her face down over the saddle-bow._

She shifted Ifrith around, preparing to lift her up.  The girl stirred. Kilda opened her mouth to reassure her, but before she could make a sound Ifrith twisted in her grasp and kicked her hard in the stomach.

Kilda lost her breath and lost her grip on the child. Ifrith fell to the ground and scrambled up again. Kilda lunged, trying to grab Ifrith before the little girl could bolt for the gate and out of it.

She’d underestimated Lord Synlake’s daughter, though. Instead of running, Ifrith whirled, pulling her little eating knife from her belt and raising it, ready to fight.

Then she dropped it and ran forward to throw her arms around Kilda’s waist. “Kilda!”

Kilda patted her thin little shoulder. “It’s alright now,” she wheezed. “I’m here.”

It was a wildly optimistic statement, and when Ifrith tilted her head back to look up at Kilda, the expression on her face said that she knew it was. “We could hear them fighting, and then the fighting stopped, but no-one came. Except the Snakkinen. They found us.”

“It wasn’t Snakkinen,” Kilda said, beginning to feel like she’d spend the rest of her life saying that.

Ifrith frowned. “They sounded like them.”

“Maybe some of them were,” Kilda said. “But — look, we can talk about it later, alright? Right now we have to get out of here.”

“Is …” Ifrith paused. She closed her eyes and said on a rush, “Is everybody dead?”

“Yes,” Kilda said.

Ifrith nodded, once, and opened her eyes. “I thought so. Because no-one came.” She let go of Kilda, and turned. One sharp gasp at the sight of the dead strewn across the courtyard, one sharp gasp and no more. “I need to find my mother.”

“She’s dead too.” Kilda flinched a little at saying it so baldly, and tried to soften it. “She died fighting.”

“I know she’s dead,” Ifrith said flatly. “Where is she?”

“On the stairs.” Kilda sighed, and held out her hand. Ifrith took it. “I’ll show you.”

Ifrith didn’t flinch as Kilda led her across the courtyard, but she was pale as bone beneath the smears of grave-filth on her face and she gripped Kilda’s hand until her knuckles turned white. Beside her mother’s body, she looked down in silence for a moment. When she spoke, her small and certain voice had a tremble to it for the first time. “They took her ring.”

“I took it. I have it safe.” Kilda fumbled in her pouch and produced it. “See?”

Ifrith held out her hand and Kilda put the ring in her palm. “We should build a pyre.  I know the words of the rites. Well, most of them.”

“We don’t have time for that.”

“A true lord always has time for his people,” Ifrith said. “We should build a pyre.”

“A true lord stays alive to get justice for his people, too.” Kilda gave the girl a push in the direction of Snail, tethered near the gate.

Ifrith set her feet. “We _will_ build a pyre, and you will _not_ push me. Those are my orders and you _will_ obey them.”

“I’m oathsworn to the guild, not to your father, and not to you,” Kilda said. “One day, maybe, when your father dies and _if_ you’re elected to follow him, you’ll be able to give orders, but right now, you’re not my lady, or anybody’s lady, and even if you were, I don’t take my orders from any lord or lady in the land.” Ifrith opened her mouth and Kilda spoke straight over her. “And you won’t ever have the chance to give anybody any orders ever if you don’t live to grow up, so let’s get out of here _right now_.”

Ifrith considered, and deigned to nod agreement. “I’ll saddle Featherfoot.”

“They stole all the horses,” Kilda said. _Including your pony_. She didn’t mention the hounds.

“Then they’re stupid,” Ifrith said with satisfaction. “Father says it’s always good when your enemy is stupid.”

Kilda raised her eyebrows. “I can’t argue, but what’s stupid about taking an entire hold-wealth of horseflesh?”

“Father knows every one of those horses from fetlock to forelock.” Ifrith began to make her way back across the courtyard, stepping carefully around the bodies. “When we know who did this, we’ll tell him, and the horses will prove it.”

_Unless they_ _’ve been sold to some poor innocent bastard who’ll find Lord Synlake’s vengeance on his trail._  “We’ll talk about it later. Right now —”

Ifrith stopped again. “If we leave, where will we go?”

“We can work it out later.” Kilda realised as she said it that she was no longer certain that Faltoff was their destination. _One of Lord Synlake_ _’s peers ordered this, ordered Ifrith’s death._ Faltoff was a town, and like all towns under the authority of the three great guilds and a town council chosen from the smaller ones. Delivering Ifrith to Faltoff would not be delivering her into the hands of her enemies … _How much am I willing to wager that the guild-masters of Faltoff will close their gates to a lord_ _’s soldiers, though?_

Not a lot. A few coins, maybe. _Not Ifrith_ _’s life._

_Then where?_

_All the way to Ceatertown, maybe, and the Guild can go to Nyx._

She pushed Ifrith again. “Right now we’re going _away_.”

Ifrith yielded to the pressure of Kilda’s hand and began moving. “If it’s a long way —”

“ _If_ you say _if_ one more time —”

“We’ll need food,” Ifrith finished as if Kilda hadn’t spoken. “Won’t we?”

_Belnir_ _’s balls_. It was galling to admit it, but the girl was right. _Food, money, bedding_ _…_ They reached Snail and Kilda took Ifrith by the waist and hoisted her unceremoniously belly-down over the saddle. “Climb on,” she said. “Think you can handle him?”

“Yes.” Ifrith straightened herself, feet dangling well above the stirrups.

Kilda loosened the reins from the rail she’d looped them over, turned Snail in the right direction and passed the reins up to Ifrith. “Go down the road to the trees this side of the ford, go into them, and wait for me. I’ll get us supplies.”

“If —”

Kilda tapped Snail on the rump and, eager to be away from this familiar place turned strange and unsettling, the horse took off out the gate, taking Ifrith and her _ifs_ with him.

Tait was still casting around the courtyard, looking for his packs. “I’ll help you,” he said. “If you help me find what’s mine.”

Kilda eyed him. “You said you were sleeping in the church?” He nodded. “Why?”

“It rained a little last night,” Tait said.

“And what had you done to be denied a place under the roof?”

“Nothing!” Tait shook his head vigorously. “Nothing, I swear.”

“I saw you sleeping in the courtyard before I rode out yesterday morning,” Kilda said. “Too drunk to find your bedroll, was it?”

“It’s Mead Moon!” Tait said defensively. “Who hasn’t drunk a little more than they should during Mead Moon Week?”

Kilda was forced to admit to herself that there was some justice to his argument. _But still_ … Some people were morose drunks, some were argumentative — and some were talkative.

Someone had come here to kill Ifrith, had tortured the hall servants until they knew where she was and then asked for her by name. And thanks to Maegrith, _poor brave girl_ , they thought they’d succeeded.

Ifrith was safe. _Until a peddler with a belly full of beer starts talking about how he hid with Lord Synlake_ _’s daughter as the hold above was put to the sword._

“I’ll help you find your packs,” Kilda said. “And you’ll help me find supplies. And then you’re coming with us.”

“Only if you’re going east,” Tait said. “That’s where I’m headed.”

“No,” Kilda said, letting her hand rest on the hilt of her sword. “You’re coming with us, where I can keep an eye on you. On you, and who you talk to.”

“I haven’t done anything except save that girl’s life!”

“You saved your own life,” Kilda said. “You wanted her quiet for your own sake, not hers.”

“I could have killed her,” Tait said, and then backed away, raising his hands, at the expression on Kilda’s face. “I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t! I just mean, if I just wanted to shut her up so I’d be safe, I could have killed her.”

“You could have told me she was there, too, and not tried to hide her.”

“You could be anyone,” Tait said. “I mean, you could have been, before the girl woke up and knew you. You could have killed the real courier and come back here to try and trick me into handing the girl over.”

“You listen to the bards too much,” Kilda said. “How come you had a sleeping potion on you, anyway? Without your pack, or anything. You carry it around just in case you’re stuck in a tomb with a crying child?”

“No, I …” His gaze slid away from her. “I’ve used it. When, you know, a customer …”

“When someone you’ve cheated might be going to work it out before you get away?” Kilda suggested.

“Times are hard,” Tait said, not denying it.

“Times are always hard.” Kilda chewed her lip for a moment, thinking. “Alright. I’ll give you credit for keeping Ifrith safe. But you’re still coming with us. Now go find your stuff, and pick up anything else useful along the way.”

It was hard for Kilda to make herself be careful and thorough as she went through the buildings of the dead, gathering what they’d need. The sun had lowered further in the time since she’d ridden in through the gate. It was still hours before it would touch the horizon, but it was slipping now behind the tall palisade and sending long stretched shadows across the sprawled bodies of the dead. Inside the surviving buildings, it was even darker. Kilda searched the stable-loft where she and the other couriers slept with the stable-hands and the blacksmith, bundling her own small store of coins with the others she found tucked beneath bedrolls or inside spare boots. She couldn’t believe they’d grudge it to her, not with the lord’s daughter in need of it. _And them gone through the Lady_ _’s gate to where they’ve no need of anything, ever again._ She considered taking an extra bedroll for Ifrith, but rejected the idea. _She_ _’s small. She’ll fit bundled in with me, and we can’t afford the extra weight._

She did take shirt and trousers and a jerkin from the stable-hands, though, wrapping them in her bedroll. Festival best, they were, carefully laid aside ready for Mead Moon, but although they were too fine for everyday wear they would be less conspicuous than Ifrith’s own, even grimy as they’d become.

Searching the kitchens by torchlight was even worse than the shadow-thronged courtyard, but Kilda set her teeth and ignored the hammering of her own pulse in her ears and did it, finding a loaf of bread that had been trampled but was still edible, two heels of hard cheese that had escaped the intruders’ search, and the remains of a hock of smoked and salted pork that had been knocked behind the oat-barrels. She put them all in a sack, filled another small sack with oats and found the smallest pot she could.

It wouldn’t be enough to get the two of them all the way to Corvale, but if they bought food where they could …

What they really needed was another horse. A pony, at least, for Ifrith, because Snail couldn’t carry them both and their baggage for very long or very fast. The small store of coins Kilda had purloined wouldn’t buy more than the most broken down nag, though, and that would leave them begging to fill their bellies.

Lord Synlake’s money would have been somewhere in the warren of rooms around the Great Hall, but if it was well enough hidden to escape the search of whoever had attacked Synlake, Kilda doubted she herself could find it. Certainly not searching by torchlight with the sweat of fear tracing icy fingers down her back and sides.

_Time to go_.

 She shouldered her burdens and walked so quickly out of the Hall that it was just short of a run. One quick stop in the courtyard, to tug the long fighting knife from the belt of one of the guards, and she was through the gates.

She’d almost forgotten about Tait, but he was waiting outside the gates, a great pile of bundles at his feet. Grudgingly, Kilda gave him credit for not taking to his heels while she was inside. “Are all those yours?”

He shook his head. “These,” he said, prodding a knapsack  hung about with smaller sacks. “The rest … some food. Dried beans, flour.” He shrugged. “That sort of thing.”

“If you think we’ll have time to soak beans or bake bread …” Kilda kicked one of the sacks and it gave a faint _clank_. “And what’s that?”

“A few things that might bring some coin.”

“You _stole_ —”

Tait cringed. “For the girl! Coin for the girl! I can sell them at the next town, a village even if they’ve had a decent year, for the girl!”

“And an-oh-so-reasonable commission for yourself?” Kilda suggested sourly.

“You’re taking me away from my livelihood,” he whined. “Kidnapping me! How am I going to live through winter?”

 “Fine,” Kilda said, aware of the shadows lengthening as they argued. “But you’ll carry it.”

“You have a horse,” Tait pointed out.

“He’s not a packhorse. Pick it up, and let’s go.”

 Tait gathered up his burdens and struggled after Kilda as she strode down the hill, ignoring his plaintive calls for her to slow down.

Ifrith was waiting for her. Kilda noted with approval that she hadn’t let Snail’s reins go, although she’d slackened her grip enough to let the horse nose around the ground beneath the trees. “Is that all?”

Kilda let the sacks drop to the scattered tufts of grass that had struggled through the litter of last year’s autumn leaves. “It’s all. It might be too much.”

“If we want to get to Ceatertown, it won’t be enough —”

Tait had caught up. “Ceatertown! I’m not going to Ceatertown.”

Kilda ignored him. “Think about carrying all that on your back and me too,” she said to Ifrith. “Then add your own weight to it, and then imagine carrying it all for a full day’s walking, and then another, and another.” She threaded the top of the sack of oats through the handle of the pot and then tied it to the end of the other sack of food. “I’ve brought as much as Snail can carry, with you added to it. Mind your hands.”

Ifrith kept her hands clear as Kilda hoisted the sacks up to hang one on either side of the pommel, impromptu saddle-bags. “So what will we do?”

“First, we’ll follow the river for a while.” Kilda tied the bundle of blankets and clothes at the back of the saddle as securely as she could. Snail blew a gentle protest, reminding her that carrying luggage was the job of other, lesser horses, horses that couldn’t outrun the wind like he could. Kilda rubbed his nose in silent apology.

Ifrith nodded. “It’ll take us all the way to Fernmere, and then —”

“We’re going the other way,” Kilda interrupted. “North, and west.”

“That’s the _wrong_ way!” Ifrith said.

“She’s right,” Tait said. “You’re very clever, little girl. We should go —”

Ifrith gave him a glare that could have withered a whole field of wheat. “I am very clever, and I don’t need you to tell me. Why are we going the wrong way, Kilda?”

“Let’s say Lord Synlake’s daughter is somehow still alive.” Kilda took the long knife from her belt and offered it to the girl. “Here. You’ll be able to do some damage with that, more than your own, anyway.”

Ifrith took it. “I _am_ still alive.”

“And the only people who know it are standing right here. As far as everyone else, and particularly the everyone else who tried to kill you …”

“I’m dead.” Ifrith frowned. “But my father …”

“Will grieve, if he hears about it. But he’d want you safe,” Kilda said. “So you’re dead. For now. But if you weren’t dead, what would you do?”

Ifrith’s forehead crinkled even further. “Go to Ceatertown. To father.”

“Ifrith would go south, and east,” Kilda said.

Ifrith nodded. “But if I’m not Ifrith, because she’s dead … so we go the other way.”

“And when — _if_ — we turn south again, it’ll be close to the Eadie border.” Kilda glared at Tait, who stopped making a production out of trying to balance the bundles he’d brought from Synlake Hall and hastily slung them over his shoulders.  Kilda took Snail’s bridle and began to lead him through the trees towards the shore of the lake. “No-one who sees us will connect us with Synlake.”

 Ifrith tugged on the reins, trying to get Snail to stop. “It’s towards the Snakkinen. What if we meet them, the ones who —”

Kilda took hold of the reins beneath Snail’s chin, so Ifrith’s tugging would only be on her own hard grip and not Snail’s tender mouth.  “I told you, it wasn’t Snakkinen. I know what you think you heard. Maybe there were Snakkinen there, but it wasn’t a raid.” They were out of the trees, now, skirting the lake at the bottom of the long pasture where the horses were turned out to graze. “Look around. See any beacon fires?”

Ifrith craned her head. “No.”

“A raid gets three days into Belpond from the border and not a soul sees them?” Kilda shook her head. “No. Besides, your mother let them in, and she’d never —” 

“Take that back!” Ifrith flared. “You take that back this instant! I’ll have you whipped for calling mother a traitor!”

 “I don’t think she was a traitor. I think whoever did this came under the banner of someone who had to be let in.” Ifrith opened her mouth again and Kilda cut her off. “When the bell rang and you came here, were the gates closed or open?”

Ifrith frowned. “Open.”

“Not even _being_ shut?”

“No.”

“Someone came here, or someone’s soldiers anyway, someone with grey in their colours, someone your mother didn’t trust but couldn’t risk offending.”

“Lord Gullham,” Ifrith said instantly. “Nedrith’s nephew. His badge is a white bird on a grey field and father says it should be a snake in the grass instead.”

“He’s not the only one whose men wear grey,” Tait panted as he struggled along behind them. “There’s Lady Northden, and Lord Moonmere, and —”

“It wasn’t them.” Ifrith’s tone was scornful. “It was Lord Gullham. Not that he’s really a lord.”

Kilda ignored the political commentary. “And what does Lord Gullham have against your mother, to send men to kill her — and you?”

“Nedrith’s dying.”

“He’s always dying, he’s older than time,” Tait said.

Tait was right, or at least partly. King Nedrith might not actually be older than time, but he was definitely older than anyone Kilda had ever personally met. He’d already been old when he’d walked into the electoral conclave held after the Last King’s death with twenty Snakkinen soldiers. Their bare blades had delivered a message to the electors of Belpond and Nedrith had been chosen as king, despite lacking the required consanguinity, despite being aged and growing frail.

_And that was before I was even born._

Ifrith shook her head. “No, he’s _dying_ dying. Mother had a message. Three days ago, from Aunt Girgith — from Lady Abethan. He’s really dying. He can’t even leave his bed for council.”

_That_ was news, news to take Belpond by the neck and shake it nearly to death. _And how did that message reach Lady Synlake?_ None of Synlake’s couriers had brought it. Kilda’s trip to Faltoff had been the first time any of them had been out of the gate for more than exercising the horses in days.

She glanced back at Tait and decided to save that question for later.  “Does Lord Gullham think your father would vote against him when King Nedrith dies?” she asked Ifrith.

“He’s not _King_ Nedrith,” Ifrith said venomously. “It’s been twenty four years since Belpond had a king. Father doesn’t need to vote against Gullham. Gullham isn’t an elector. He can’t be king, any more than Nedrith is.”

“But Lord Synlake could,” Kilda said slowly. “He’s the Last King’s nephew. Isn’t he?” _The Last King_ _’s nephew, and King Pethnir’s cousin._ “He’s within three generations.”

Ifrith nodded. “So am I. That’s why it’s Gullham. That’s why he did this.”

“I don’t think King Nedrith is dying,” Kilda said. 

“My mother said —”

“I think he’s _dead_ ,” Kilda interrupted. “I think he’s died while most of the Lords Belpond are at Ceatertown with King Pethnir and I think that Lord Gullham —”

“He’s not a lord, not really. Nedrith gave him Gullham, and Nedrith’s not properly the king so he didn’t have the right.”

“Right or not, Gullham has the swords and soldiers and the coin of a lord,” Tait said. “If he’s trying to kill you, little missy, it doesn’t make much difference.”

Ifrith twisted in the saddle to look back at him. “You should call me _my lady_ ,” she said flintily.

 He grinned at her. “Only if you’re Ifrith of Synlake,” he said cheerfully. “And weren’t we just saying that Ifrith of Synlake is dead, little missy?”

Ifrith glared at him, and then ostentatiously turned to face forward again. “Nedrith can’t be already dead. There’s no reason for Gullham to hurt me, or — or mother.”

“How about, the kings of Eadie and Yenlake don’t want the electors of Belpond meeting at Ceatertown where their swords don’t reach?” Kilda suggested. “And if news of Nedrith’s death reached Corvale while all the lords of Belpond are still there, that’s where the conclave would be.”

“They won’t keep it secret for long,” Tait said. “A dead king. Word will flow out of the palace like water through a sieve.”

“And you know the ways of palaces, do you?” They had reached the end of the pasture and Kilda led Snail uphill a little, to a thin deer track winding through the trees.

“I know the ways of people,” Tait said, following them into the trees. Kilda glanced back at him, the shadows of the trees ahead of them stretching long fingers that broke the little peddler’s face into unexpected planes and angles. His hair and eyes looked even darker,  and for a moment Kilda could almost have mistaken him for the model for one of the old paintings of the People of Nyx, all black hair and black eyes and malice.

Then he grinned at her, and was the impudent tinker again. “I _do_ know the ways of people,” he said. “And I might not know the ways of palaces, but I doubt kings or great lords or even small ones empty their own chamberpots or wash their own linen or cook their own meals. It takes plenty of people to look after the high and mighty, people who have to go out to the market place for fish for m’lord’s supper or flowers for m’lady’s chamber. People who answer the servant’s door when the miller’s boy brings the flour for m’lord’s bread or the weaver brings the cloth for m’lady’s fine new dress.” He hoisted a slipping sack higher on his shoulder. “How long until your father comes home, little missy?”

Kilda answered for Ifrith. “A week. A little more, probably.”

“A week. Can they keep every servant out of the king’s chambers for a week? With the floor to be swept and the linen to be changed and the old man to be washed and dressed?” Tait shook his head. “A day, two, maybe, saying he wants his rest and not to be bothered. Longer than that, they’ll suspect. Too much longer, and they’ll know. And one of them …”

“Will tell the miller’s girl or the butcher’s boy,” Kilda said. “But it will still take days for a message to get south to Ceatertown.”

 “By your guild, maybe,” Tait said. “But I’ve seen news travel fast, Kilda the Courier. Faster than the fastest horse, sometimes. And this is that kind of news.”

_Mother had a message_ , Ifrith had said, when no courier had come or gone …

“So they can’t keep it secret long,” Kilda said. “And the conclave will be held in Ceatertown.”

Tait stopped, rearranging his burdens. “Only if nothing happens to bring Lord Synlake back north in a hurry, and never mind King Pethnir’s feast.”

“Belnir’s bloody knife,” Kilda said softly. “Nothing like news of his hall burned and his wife and daughter and all his people put to the sword.”

“If father’s coming,” Ifrith said, “then we can hide, and wait.”

“Waiting is the last thing we can do,” Kilda said. “Duck down or the branches will have you on your arse in the dirt.”

Ifrith scrunched down in the saddle. “He’ll come as fast as he can. It wouldn’t be long, if we wait.”

“Waiting sounds good,” Tait said, stopping to untangle one of his bundles from a sapling. “We could start waiting now, if you like, little missy.”

“We’re not waiting, because Lord Synlake _will_ come as fast as he can,” Kilda said. She let go of Snail’s reins long enough to jerk Tait’s bundle free and push him ahead of her along the track. “As fast as he can, by the quickest road, and there’ll be no conclave in Ceatertown without him.”

“So they’ll hold it in Sandertown,” Ifrith said slowly. “Where they think people will do what they’re told. My father won’t, though! He knows what’s right.”

Kilda slowed down, holding Snail to her pace, letting Tait get further ahead of them. She lowered her voice. “He won’t do anything in Sandertown if there’s a handy spot for an ambush on the fastest road north.”

“They can’t kill him!” Ifrith hissed.

Kilda glanced up at her. “Today it looks to me like they can kill anyone.”

“If they’ve sent a courier to bring father north, you have to beat them there! Tell him the truth, tell him it’s a trap.”

Kilda shook her head. “I can’t.”

“You can so!” Ifrith snapped. “Snail is the fastest horse in the world, Father says so.”

“If a message has gone, it’s a day ahead of me already. I can’t beat it to Ceatertown.”

“You can and you will!” Ifrith said fiercely. “I order it!”

“Snail’s fast, but not that fast, not carrying two of us.”

That stopped Ifrith, but only for as long as it took Kilda to take two paces. “Then I’ll stay here! I’ll go back to Synlake and I’ll defend it until you come back with Father!”

“Even so, Snail can’t run day and night, not that far. Where will it be safe for me to get remounts, between the towns?” Kilda asked. “Who reports to Lord Gullham? Who’ll poison my stew, or knife me in my sleep? Can you tell me that?”

Ifrith was silent. “No,” she said at last.

“When your father hears … whatever they tell him, King Pethnir will insist on sending men. He’ll have to. Your father took only two dozen south. And that will take time. Maybe a day, maybe two. And then they’ll be travelling more slowly. It will take them days to get out of Corvale, maybe a week.” 

“So we don’t have to stop him leaving,” Ifrith said slowly. “We have to stop him before they have the chance to ambush him.”

“Ambush him, and King Pethnir’s soldiers,” Kilda said. “Count on a hundred or more. They’ll need somewhere this side of the border where Lord — where Gullham’s men can take that many soldiers. All of them, because if it is him —”

“It is,” Ifrith said decisively.

“Then he can’t afford witnesses surviving that ambush, any more than he could afford witnesses here.”

Ifrith frowned. “Where? Where would they choose to ambush him?”

Kilda shrugged. “I’m a courier. You’re the one who had the benefit of a lord’s education. You’re going to need to be the one to work that out.”


	5. Kilda: The Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kilda makes a plan

It was not the way Kilda had expected to spend the night of the Mead Moon.

She lay on her back, staring up at the full moon through the leaves of the tree that sheltered them. The night was clear. Above her, the moon seemed to hang so low in the soft summer air that it ran the risk of being caught in the slender branches overhead.

Ifrith curled beside her, utterly and soundly asleep. She hadn’t complained at the hard pace Kilda had set — although Tait had, constantly — but two days of travel had left the girl too tired to even keep up her constant flow of _if_ and _if_ and _if._ She’d fallen asleep without even finishing the heel of bread and lump of cheese that was the last of the meagre rations Kilda had taken from the kitchens, except for the oats.

_Probably the only child in the country sleeping, tonight._ Even sleepy little hamlets like the one Kilda had grown up in would be awake tonight. They’d be alight with torches and bonfires and alive with whatever home-made entertainments and treats they could supply. In larger places, it was the richest time of the year for acrobats and dancers, jugglers and musicians. Most arranged their whole year’s travel around the Mead Moon feast. They carefully planned their route to bring them to the biggest place on their circuit in time to earn enough coin to see them through the lean autumn, when only the desperate risked the roads under the shadow of raids, and the long winter months when they’d exhaust their repertoire and their audience’s purses long before the snows melted and the roads were open again.

At Synlake, the doors to the Great Hall would have been flung open and the tables piled high —

Except only the crows and the flies feasted at Synlake tonight, and Lord Synlake’s daughter’s Mead Moon treats had been stale bread and hard cheese, and not much of either.

Kilda gritted her teeth and turned her thoughts away from Synlake Hall. _Tomorrow, we_ _’ll turn south_. They were far enough towards the border between Eadie and Belpond now to pass as travellers from one of the border towns fleeing before the falling leaves brought the autumn raiding. _Or at least I hope we are._

At least Ifrith didn’t look anything like a lord’s daughter at the moment. She was wearing the clothes Kilda had taken from the stable-loft. They were stained with travel, and too big for her. The rolled sleeves and trouser legs added to the disguise. Ifrith’s own clothes were down the bottom of the now-empty sack of food. Kilda had thought of burning or burying them. _Some stray scrap of fine cloth, though, telling the story of a great lady where none should be_ … _too  much risk_.

_One more orphaned girl dressed in hand-me-downs._ Kilda looked down at the girl’s head, copper hair bleached to steel by the moon’s silver light, and wished she’d had the foresight to purloin a hat, as well. Still, there had been enough princes scattering enough bastards around the countryside in the past hundred years for the colour to no longer be a flag waved declaring royal blood.

She rolled over carefully, although there wasn’t much danger she’d disturb Ifrith’s exhausted slumber. On the other side of the tree, Tait snored faintly. For all his complaints, his wheedling suggestions they turn aside at this ford or that hill for a village he knew or a town he’d heard of, he’d kept up. He hadn’t tried to bolt when Kilda had dozed despite herself the night before. The beans he’d brought despite Kilda’s protests were soaking in their cooking pot overnight, and Tait had assured her they’d cook as quickly as oats in the morning.

None of it was enough to make her trust him. _But perhaps when we turn south, I can let him go his own way. Even if he talks, it_ _’ll take time for the talk to reach Gullham’s hired ears. We’ll be ahead of the news, all the way to Corvale._

She and Ifrith would be an aunt and her niece escaping … escaping what?

Travelling south to where?

_Perhaps the truth, or some of it, is the best story_ , Kilda thought.

In the morning, while Tait was gathering firewood for them to cook the beans, Kilda explained her idea to Ifrith. She kept her voice low, even though Tait had wandered out of sight in the trees. “Your father is a man-at-arms in King Pethnir’s service. Your mother has died, and I’m your aunt, taking you south to your father.”

Ifrith frowned. “How did my parents meet?” she asked, just as softly. “If he’s with King Pethnir, and we’re from … where are we from?”

“Abethan?” Kilda suggested. “That’s close enough to north of here for it to make sense.” She shrugged. “And you’ve been there, haven’t you, with your father? So you won’t make any stupid mistakes like forgetting if it’s on a river. So, your mother was in service to Abethan, went south on some business or other for her lady, met a handsome man …”

“What was her name? What’s his name?”

“Igrith, like yours, and … Hentirn.”

“And what did she die of?”

“A fall. From a horse. Hit her head, and that was it.”

Igrith nodded. “Hentirn, in service to King Pethnir. I’ve never met him. And Igrith, who died from a fall from a horse. A month ago, before Aunt Girgith — Lady Abethan — left for Ceatertown.”

“Why?”

“Because you’d never take a horse like Snail without your lady’s permission, and you’d never be able to afford him yourself,” Ifrith said.

It was true. Kilda knew it was true, knew that Snail wasn’t _her_ horse, for all that she was the only one who ever rode him. Knowing it was true didn’t make her voice any less sharp. “Then she would have taken you south herself. Think your way _around_ that.”

Ifrith’s grave little gaze met Kilda’s. “My mother died after Lady Abethan left,” she said. “She’d already given you Snail, for your own, as thanks for your service. Snail is _your_ horse.”

“It must have been some fine service, for her to give me Snail.”

Ifrith shrugged. “Be gruff and embarrassed about it, if anyone asks. Like Taernth is, when someone asks him about what he did in the Demon Wars.” She paused. “Like Taernth _was_.” 

“Ifrith …” Gods above and below, the girl was stubborn and self-possessed and almost scarily composed, but she was just a girl. Kilda’s own stomach turned at the memory of Synlake’s courtyard.

“You’d better stop calling me that,” Ifrith said steadily. “If Ifrith is supposed to be dead.”

Kilda glanced over her shoulder. Tait was visible again, but he was still a fair way away, picking through the fallen branches for pieces small enough for their fire. “What do you want to be called, then?”

“Ifita,” Ifrith said so promptly that Kilda knew she’d thought about it. “Then if you slip, and call me _Iffy_ , it won’t seem odd.”

Kilda nodded. “And you’ll call me … Auntie.”

“Auntie Kilda,” Ifrith said flatly. “You don’t look like anyone’s Auntie.”

Kilda raised her eyebrows. “It may surprise you to know that I am, in fact, someone’s auntie.” Several someone’s auntie, in fact, her elder brother and his wife having been favoured by Maynith, repeatedly.

“I suppose you’re plenty old enough.” Ifrith’s tone was grudging. “Why don’t you have any children of your own?”

“Because I don’t like children,” Kilda said. “And you’re not doing anything to change my mind.” Ifrith blinked, and Kilda felt a pang of guilt. “I’m sorry. That’s not fair. You’ve been very brave.”

_That_ got a glare. “Don’t talk down to me.”

“Then don’t be rude,” Kilda said.

“The two of you deserve each other,” Tait said from behind Kilda. He stepped around her and dumped his armload of sticks on the ground. “Although what I’ve done to deserve either of you, I don’t know, except do a good turn for the little missy.”

Ifrith turned her glare from Kilda to Tait, but she’d learnt over the last few days that objecting to the term only ensured Tait would use it more often.

Kilda got to her knees and started building the fire.  “Thank you for the beans,” both honesty and courtesy forced her to say. “You were right to bring them.”

Tait inspected the pot, stirring the beans with one finger and picking out an insect that had drowned in the soaking water overnight. “You travel soft, you couriers. Beds in every town or holding, for the asking. Hot food, cooked in a kitchen. No idea how to live on the road, any of you.”

“Then it’s lucky we have you with us, isn’t it?” Kilda said mildly. “Is that why you haven’t run off, to make sure we don’t starve along the way?”

Tait shrugged. “I don’t think much of my future chances if something happens to the little missy and you decide Tait the traveller’s a good place to lay the blame.”

“Kilda wouldn’t do that,” Ifrith said quickly. “She’s not mean.”

Tait grinned. “She’s perhaps a little bit mean, missy. Kidnapping an honest man —”

Kilda snorted. “Honest.”

Tait winked at her. “Kidnapping a man who was just about his trade and forcing him to march across the countryside until his poor feet are nearly walked off. I don’t think you’ll be earning the name Kilda the Kind anytime soon.”

Kilda finished laying the last sticks over the tinder and fished flint and steel from her pocket. “If you want to turn back east, I won’t stop you.”

“Oh, you’re Kilda with a conscience now?” Tait asked.

Ifrith crouched down beside Kilda, ready to blow on the tinder once Kilda struck a spark. “If you don’t want to be with us, I wish you _would_ just leave.”

“No longer worried I’ll spill your secret?” Tait asked.

Kilda rapped the flint and steel together and scattered sparks into the tinder. Smoke began to creep upwards as Ifrith blew softly and steadily. “I wouldn’t mention to anyone you met that you’ve been at Synlake,” she said to Tait. “And not just because of Ifrith. They thought they killed all the witnesses, remember?”

He frowned at her. “I didn’t see anything.”

Kilda shrugged, and fed a twig into the delicate flames. “They might not believe that. I think we’re close enough to Eadie that you can claim to be coming back from there.”

“And what happens to me when you tell your tale to Lord Synlake?” Tait asked. “When all of Belpond and Corvale, and more to the point, Eadie and Yenlake, know that Tait the traveller survived Synlake Hall as well as Kilda the Cruel and little missy here?”

Kilda gave him a level look. “That’s assuming Tait is actually your name,” she said. “Which I’m not.”

He had the grace to look away. “It’s _a_ name, anyway.”

“Get gone, make yourself scarce, forget you ever went to Synlake or know what happened there or met either of us,” Kilda advised. “Keep what you took from Synlake, that’s fair enough for your trouble.”

“You’ve brought me here, a day’s ride from Snakkinen lands, at sword-point —”

“Hardly sword-point.” The fire was well alight now, and Kilda set the pot of beans on top of it.

“Through threats,” Tait said. “And now you say, oh, Tait, make your own way through these dangerous parts. Good luck!”

 “I think you’re used to taking care of yourself in dangerous parts,” Ifrith said. “You were pretty quick down to stairs to the crypt. That’s supposed to be for children.” 

Tait spread his hands. “I’m just a poor peddler, little missy. Not a fearsome fighter, like Kilda the Cruel here. Nothing for me to do when swords come out but hide.”

Kilda stirred the beans without looking at him, remembering his calm, even voice in the crypt beneath Synlake Hall’s church. _If you try to hurt me, I_ _’ll kill you as dead as Synlake’s grandfather here._ “That’s as may be,” she said, “and I suppose that since you weren’t under the roof that night, you’d neither guest-right or guest-duty. You have been some help, so thank you, but if you travel on with us I’ll have to think of some way to explain you.” She turned, and looked him up and down. “And frankly, I’m not sure my imagination is up to the task.”

He grinned, quite unoffended. “Chance met on the road, travelling together for safety,” he said. “It’s common, you know. Times are hard, the roads are long, and there’s more than a few men and women in this wide world who’ll knife a traveller in his sleep.”

Kilda considered. “We’re coming from Abethan,” she said at last. “Where are you coming from, that our paths crossed?”

“Coreban,” Tait said promptly.

“In Yenlake?” Ifrith asked.

“That’s where Coreban was, last time I saw it.” He raised an eyebrow. “It’s quite civilised, you know. The three great guilds, the town council …”

“The Snakkinen,” Ifrith said flatly.

Tait shrugged. “Snakkinen, and Winterfolk too. Plenty of your folk, too. All customers.”

Ifrith snorted. “What do Snakkinen want to buy? Chains to hang their bones from?”

“The same as anybody wants to buy, little missy. Lace to trim a dress, a ribbon to give a sweetheart, a set of fine sewing needles crafted far across the sea …” He shook his head. “They’re not so very different from you or from me. In Yenlake, or Eadie, at least.”

“ _I_ don’t murder people, and steal their harvest and their livestock and sell their children as slaves!” Ifrith said.

“Well, neither do they, in their own countries,” Tait said.

Ifrith rose to her feet, hands on her hips. “Yenlake and Eadie are _not_ their countries!” 

“So you’ve been in Coreban,” Kilda said hastily, knowing from experience that once Ifrith got started on the historical wrongs suffered by the countries of Eadie, Yenlake and Belpond at the hands of the Snakkinen, there was no stopping her short of a hand over her mouth. “Selling ribbons and needles. I’m Ifita’s aunt, taking her to live with her father since her mother’s recently died.”

“She fell from her horse, and hit her head,” Ifrith said.

Tait shook his head. “You wouldn’t set out on a journey like that with one horse and no change of clothes. Little missy would have her pony, you’d have a pack-horse with you, you wouldn’t be wandering like a vagabond such as myself.”

“Maybe we were robbed,” Kilda suggested.

Tait snorted. “Oh, and they took a pack-horse and a pony and left you that fine piece of horseflesh you ride?”

“Then what’s your suggestion?” Kilda asked, trying not to sound sullen. She’d been quite proud of her plan.

“I suggest we get some more horses,” Tait said. “And a few changes of clothes, and so on.”

“I’ve enough coin for a broken-down nag, and not much more,” Kilda said.

Tait leaned over and patted one of the sacks he’d been stubbornly hauling with him. It clinked faintly, and he grinned. “Then you’ll have to owe me, won’t you?”

 

 

 

 


	6. Kilda: Weathermere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kilda makes an unwelcome discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! I wrote several chapters that I wasn't happy enough with to post, and finally realised that the problem wasn't going to be solved by re-writing, but by scrapping and changing direction a bit.

“Keep your head down,” Kilda told Ifrith for the fifth time. “Stay close to Tait, and —”

“I _know_ ,” Ifrith said. “Don’t speak to anyone, don’t touch anything, don’t draw any attention.”

Kilda chewed her lip. “Maybe you’d better come with me, after all,” she said. “We can pretend that your pony threw a shoe and —”

“And within an hour, every one of the hundred inhabitants of Weathermere will have heard the story, the one blacksmith who will be quite sure he isn’t re-shoeing anyone’s pony included,” Tait said.

“And the minute anyone sees her with _you_ ,” Kilda said, “they’ll wonder what you’re doing with her.”

He shrugged. “I won’t be the first traveller with a dead wife and offspring in tow. The two of us have no horses, and I’m buying mounts for us. Let’s not confuse the issue with questions about your fine steed, shall we?”

“I’ll be alright, Kilda,” Ifrith said. “Really.”

Kilda hesitated, but she had to admit to herself that Tait’s argument made sense. “Alright,” she said at last. “But if there’s any trouble, I’ll be at the library. And the first thing you do, Tait, is you get Ifrith a hat.”

He sketched a mock salute at her. Kilda snorted, and turned Snail’s head toward the gates of Weathermere.

Years ago, when she’d been not much older than Ifrith was now, Kilda had seen Ceatertown. She could hardly remember the journey itself now, just a vague recollection of days riding beside her father, each of them with a string of horses bred and raised on their farm, of nights by the campfire listening to one or the other of her father’s herdsmen spinning stories in the dark.

Her first sight of Ceatertown, though, was still as clear as yesterday. The last hours of travel along narrow roads flanked on either side by hedges so thick and tall it was like riding through a tunnel, and then one last bend and the broad shining surface of Merrowmere ahead. One thin bridge spanned the lake’s narrowest point, barely wide enough for a waggon, looking at a distance like a strand of cobweb. Ahead, the great sprawl of Merrowshore, a makeshift camp for travellers who couldn’t find beds in Ceatertown itself grown into a permanent settlement of twice as many people as the king’s city itself held.

And across the lake, behind a wooden palisade taller and thicker than Kilda would have believed possible, the hill of Ceatertown, a jumble of tiled and thatched roofs clinging precariously to its steep sides, rising to a white stone wall that ringed the very summit.

Faltoff was one of the largest towns in Belpond, but Faltoff had always looked like a village next to Kilda’s memory of Ceatertown.

Weathermere, however, looked like a village when compared to Faltoff. Compared to Ceatertown, Weathermere barely existed.

As she rode through the gate, Kilda noted that the palisade, at least, was sturdy and in good repair. _I_ _’d bet good coin that they haven’t the spears to man it all the way around, though_.  If there were more than two dozen buildings crammed in between the palisade and the sharp upward slope of the hill that bore the library, she would have been surprised. They huddled together, upper storeys almost touching above the narrow unpaved streets.

Kilda found herself drawing altogether more attention that she would have liked from Weathermere’s few inhabitants. A woman tossing a bucket of water out into the street paused politely to let Kilda pass, then stared with her mouth ajar. A child running barefoot down the hill leapt nimbly over the timbers bracing one turn of the street to avoid splinters and then pulled up short so quickly he almost lost his balance as he saw Snail. Even the chickens pecking around someone’s doorway moved out of her way with, it seemed, more curiosity than alarm.

Travel-stained and dirty as both she and Snail were, there was still no mistaking the quality of either her horse or her gear. If she’d used her courier’s medallion and left Snail at the stables by the gate, her presence would have been entirely understandable and completely unremarkable. As it was, though, she supposed that they wondered who she served and why she rode without colours.

Grudgingly, Kilda had to admit to herself that Tait had been right. _If I had Ifrith up on the saddle-bow before me, I_ _’d garner more than a few curious stares._

She came around the last switchback turn and out from between the houses onto the steep slopes of Weathermere’s peak. Ahead of her, the street dwindled down to a thin path clearly worn only by human feet. Eyeing the incline, Kilda could see why. _A horse would have to be part goat to make that climb_. She turned in the saddle to look back over the little town. The perilous slant of the ground at the top of the hill explained why the houses clustered together instead of straggling up to the library as they did in Faltoff, filling every inch of buildable space within the palisade.

She left Snail demonstrating his appreciation for the dark summer grass that covered the slope, and began to climb to the top. _They must have dragged the stones for the library up by hand._ As the sun beat on the back of her neck and her legs ached, Kilda didn’t much envy them.

Sanity would suggest choosing a site further down the hill for anything made of stone,  where oxen or horses could be used to move the building materials. But no library could be built anywhere but the highest point of the town that held it, and so men and women had hauled on ropes as their feet slipped on the grass and no doubt cursed with every step.

Kilda paused for breath and tilted her head back to look at the building above her. Not a particularly large or impressive building, as libraries went. _But then, if you were bringing every single scrap that went into putting it together up this last steep climb, you wouldn_ _’t make it an inch larger than absolutely necessary._ Oddly shaped to accommodate the irregular slope — Kilda could see three sides from where she stood and guessed there’d be at least two more on the other side of the building — the stones of the library’s foundation were sunk solidly into the earth.

And above those stone walls, the library’s tower rising needle-thin into the cloudless sky.

Kilda had spent seven years cultivating a professional absence of curiosity and a complete disinclination to speculate about anything — about the messages she carried, the people she carried them for, or the consequences of their delivery.

That had not made her stupid, though, or unobservant. She gazed up at the tip of Weathermere’s library tower and thought about messages taken to and from Faltoff’s librarian to Synlake Hall, about news that travelled faster than a horse could gallop, about Lady Synlake knowing from her sister-in-law that King Nedrith was dead when no man or woman of the courier’s guild could have brought it.

 _I really hope I_ _’m right_ , Kilda thought as she climbed the last few steps that brought her to the library door. She took a deep breath, raised her hand to the iron ring bolted to the door, and knocked.

After a delay long enough for Kilda to consider knocking again, the door creaked open. Her eyes a little dazzled by the bright midsummer sun, Kilda could only make out the dim room within in the most general terms — two desks and chairs, a single bench for those waiting, and a set of stairs curving away to the left leading, no doubt, to the library itself.

The door had been opened by a young woman, too young to be a librarian. She stepped back to let Kilda enter. “I’m Midita, scribe of this library,” she said, and Kilda noted that Midita might not be a librarian yet but she had already developed the habit of speaking just above a murmur.

“I’m — it doesn’t really matter. I need to send a message,” Kilda said.

The young scribe blinked. “The Couriers Guild is down by the south gate.”

“Not that …” Kilda’s voice trailed off. “Is there someone here, maybe, who spends a lot of time up in the library tower? Maybe at night?”

“How did you know?” Midita asked, puzzled.

Kilda sighed with relief. “So there is?”

“Well, there used to be. Librarian Pernth. But he died. We’re — the scribes — waiting for a replacement.”

 _Lady fuck me_ _blind_. Kilda turned away from the girl and leaned her forehead against the wall.

Midita touched her arm gently. “Is everything alright? Did you know Pernth?”

 _No, everything is_ not _alright. Everything is about as wrong as it could be._ “No, I didn’t know him. Everything’s fine. I —” She took a deep breath. “How long until you get a new librarian? Today, do you think? Tomorrow?”

“It was only three days ago. We’ve sent word to the guildmasters but it won’t have reached them yet, let alone —”

Kilda closed her eyes, summoning up maps she hadn’t needed to study in years.  “Beechdale is less than a day’s ride.” She opened her eyes again and frowned at Midita. “You should have an answer, and someone spare from one of the nearer libraries. You should have had it yesterday.”

Midita blinked at her. “Beechdale? We sent a message to Ceatertown, to the guildmasters at the King’s Library.”

“You sent to them directly. By courier.”

“Yes, of course —”

“Belnir’s bloody sword!” The oath was quiet and vicious, cracking through the air. “I hope your learning’s deeper than your common sense, or I pity any town that wins you as a librarian.”

Stung, Midita glared back at her. She drew herself up to her full height, which was not a particularly imposing one. “I may not be a librarian, but I am an experienced scribe, and I was our librarian’s main assistant, before he died. If you tell me what your needs are, I might be able to help.”

“Did you assist him in the tower?” Kilda asked.

“Why would he need —”

Kilda raised a hand to cut her off. “It doesn’t matter.” It _did_ matter, very much, if she was to get word to Lord Synlake in time to warn him of the trap she suspected had been set for him, but she wasn’t about to tell this little scribe who she was, or who she travelled with. _Nor speculate on possible guild secrets that her own guild masters haven_ _’t seen fit to initiate her to._ It shocked her a little to realise how close she’d come, how much her questions about the tower might have betrayed to someone a little quicker on the uptake than this scribe seemed to be. _Less than a week and I_ _’m already ready to ride roughshod across the web that holds the world together._ Perhaps the guildmasters had been right, when they decreed that even the smallest breech of an oath had to be met with death. _One little crack — a detour, to take Ifrith somewhere safe — one little crack, for all the best reasons in the world, and the whole thing starts to fall to pieces._

 _And what if I_ _’m wrong?_

She didn’t really think she was wrong. _All those messages to and from Vitian_ _… and now another librarian here, who spends his time in the tower …_

Spent his time in the tower, which was the cause of her problem at the moment, that past tense for the dead librarian’s activities.

“Look,” she said to the scribe. “I strongly suggest you send a message by courier to Beechdale, telling them what happened. I’m not of your guild, but everyone knows, every town must have a librarian, a courier, and a demon hunter. No matter how small the town is, one of each, at least.”

“I’ll consider it,” Midita said, with that Kilda personally considered to be a certain lack of gratitude for what was very good advice. _And if I_ _’m right, advice that might spare her a considerable amount of grief from her guildmasters, when they find out Weathermere’s library has been effectively empty for days already._

 _And if I_ _’m right, make sure that the news Tait spoke of, the news that travels faster than a galloping horse, gets to where it needs to be._

“I’m going to Beechdale,” she said, although she hadn’t been planning it. _It_ _’s the nearest library, anyway. It’s the sensible place to head._

 _If I_ _’m right._

With a quick shake of her head, Kilda dismissed the nagging thought that she was in fact, wrong, and heading west toward Beechdale was going in precisely the wrong direction. “I’m going to Beechdale,” she said again. “I can tell the librarian there what’s happened here, if you like.”

Midita’s lips thinned. “Weathermere might be small, but the people here support the Great Guilds as they should. We can afford a courier’s fee.”

Holding on to her temper with both hands, Kilda nodded. “Glad to hear it.” The snippy little scribe’s stiff neck was understandable, of course, bearing in mind that she didn’t think she was talking to a fellow member of one of the three Great Guilds, but just a chance-met stranger who’d refused to give a name or a reason for her visit.

Still, it rankled. _And I_ _’ll tell them at Beechdale anyway, even if this girl_ does _send word by courier._

“Good day to you,” she said politely, and even managed a courteous bow, and then strode back down the hill to Snail, and hopefully to Tait and Ifrith and two more horses.


	7. Midita: Weathermere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Midita has second thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dates might change a little as I refine the time line of the historical events before the story starts. Also, in the last chapter, I inadvertently referred to the Weathermere librarian as "Pethnir". His name is in fact "Pernth" and that error has been corrected.

Midita closed the door behind the nameless stranger and went back up the stairs to the library. She was still vibrating with indignation. _Telling me what I should have done and should do, when it comes to my duties as a scribe. Me! Some scruffy traveller, hair just as brown as mine, shabby leather coat and clearly hadn_ _’t had a wash in days …_

If she’d been writing the chronicle of her life, _which of course I_ _’m not, because only librarians write chronicles and even King Pethnir doesn’t get a whole chronicle to himself, just lots of mentions in others,_ but _if_ she had been, today’s entry would have read something like _On the day after the full of the Mead Moon, year 35 since Kings, Midita the scribe of Weathermere maintained a befitting dignity in the face of considerable rudeness from a vagrant traveller._

Midita flung open the shutters on the northern window and leaned her elbows on the wide stone sill, looking out over the town of Weathermere. _Vagrant or indigent? Which is better?_

At midsummer, Weathermere’s steep streets and close-packed thatched roofs had a charming rustic air, only enhanced by the chickens hunting for insects among the grass below the library’s walls and the sound of a cow lowing gently somewhere down the hill. In a few months, though, when the autumn storms that gave Weathermere its name swept in from the west, the lashing rain they dumped turned those streets to sticky mud and then to torrents and finally to almost waterfalls. Muddy water flooded over doorsteps and turned the straw-covered dirt floors within to more mud, muddy water washed through the cow-byres and pigpens and ran onward with a fresh and noisome burden, muddy water turned the fields and gardens at the foot of the hill to a sea of impassable sludge.

Then the weather would turn and those same sea storms would drop snow by such handfuls that even Sirt the Whitehanded would be jealous, snow to cover the streets deep enough to lose a small child or even a not-so-small one, to drift up against the walls of the houses and seep through the shutters and around the cracks of the doors and melt there. Everyone would long for spring, would talk of nothing about how much they longed for spring, until spring came and the thaw flooded icy through their houses, followed by spring storms that brought as much misery as the autumn ones.

Now, at midsummer, it was hard to understand why Weathermere had never grown much beyond its thirty -odd houses surrounded by pastures and fields, but for every other season of  the year it made perfect sense.

It was a town, though, not a village: it had a library, and a demon well, and the courier guild. The couriers guild might be represented by one ageing rider who rode a borrowed horse when she was required to ride at all, and the demon well might be in the basement of a house that was much like the others, including down to the floods; except for the inexplicable chill in its walls, but they were there.

So was the library. It had only one librarian, and three scribes to serve as his apprentices. Its  collection of books and scrolls was small and shabby, shabbier since mice had taken advantage of the library cat entering her dotage and made their nests in the shelves along the east wall.

It was a library, none the less, and so Weathermere was a town.

Midita took one more deep breath of the warm summer air and turned back to what was, as she’d had to admit to the stranger in her heavy leather coat, a library without a librarian.

Librarian Pernth had died quite suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity for anyone to send a message south to Corvale and ensure a replacement arrived while Pernth still lingered in the Here — as, strictly speaking, was not only proper but necessary. No library could be without a librarian, just as no courier’s stable could be without a courier or demon well without a demon hunter to guard it.

But Pernth had been a young man, at least, fairly young for a librarian. He had not been ill. He had, simply and inexplicably one day at dinner, begun to talk in nonsense syllables between one sentence and the next. Put to bed, the next day he’d been unable to rise. Midita had sat with him while one of the other two scribes ran down the dusty streets with a message for the courier to take south. She’d soothed Pernth as he babbled agitatedly at her, caught the one hand he could still raise as he tried to reach for the stack of books by his bed, and, before the scribe had come panting back up the hill, she’d closed Pernth’s eyes forever.

And Weathermere was, however temporarily, without a librarian.

Over an evening meal of bread and cheese, scrabbled together by Midita as much out of the conviction that they ought to try at least to pretend to normalcy as because she thought either of her colleagues could summon more appetite than she could, with Pernth’s body upstairs, she’d suggested that they choose one of their number to stand in the librarian’s place, until the Royal Library in Corvale sent a replacement.

The suggestion had been greeted with a horror that Midita thought, privately, was exaggerated by Pethian and Jilthi’s awareness that of the three of them, Midita was the logical choice for the role of temporary, informal, and illegal librarian. She wasn’t the oldest of the three scribes, that was Jilthi; she didn’t write the neatest hand, either, that was Pethian. _But I_ _’m the only one who was trained in the King’s own Royal Library in Ceatertown. I’m the one Pernth chose to assist him, every time. I was the one he asked to make a fair copy of his newest pages, to be sent south the Ceatertown; I was the one he talked to, explaining why he’d chosen this word instead of that one, why he’d picked this event and not another, to include in his chronicle._

_I was the one he was going to write to the guildmasters in the King_ _’s own library to recommend for my final training and tests._

There had been no point saying any of that, however. It might have made her feel a little better, but it wouldn’t have changed the minds of the other two scribes.

_And who knows who the new librarian will favour? I might still be here copying line by line, or taking dictation from Weathermere_ _’s guildmasters, when Jilthi and Pethian have libraries of their own._

She sighed, and crossed to the other side of the library to open the shutters there. At this window, she could see the brown scorched patch of grass between the town and the library walls where they’d built Pernth’s pyre. Midita looked away from it, suddenly aware that she’d been fretting over the possibility that Pernth’s death might snatch away the chance to qualify as a librarian at her improbably young age of twenty-three, instead of grieving.

_You really ought to be ashamed of yourself._

Well, she might have a few personal flaws, but her dedication to the library and to her duty was exemplary. _All agreed that Midita the scribe was as dutiful and scrupulous as it was possible to be,_ her chronicle would have said, quite truthfully.

That woman and her suggestions that sending direct to Ceatertown had been the wrong thing to do! _And who in the Here and the Where did she think she was, anyway, to talk to a scribe like that, as if she was_ _…_

Midita frowned. The stranger hadn’t had a hint of the deference even a library scribe was used to receiving. In fact, she’d spoken to Midita with the easy familiarity of another servant of the library. _Or one of the other Great Guilds._ Not a demon-hunter, certainly: even out of robes, no demon-hunter would leave their well without their staff and demon jar.

But that heavy leather coat in the middle of summer … now Midita thought about it, there’d been a stiffness in the way it fell from the woman’s shoulders to suggest hidden metal plates. She’d been grimy with travel, and the hilt of the sword at her waist was only wound with wire and absent any other decoration, but she’d worn that sword easily, keeping the scabbard out from between her legs without even seeming to need to think about it.

Most people wore a sword when it was their turn to give their eighty days service to defend their town or their lord. Midita had seen them, stumbling over their scabbards when they strayed between their ankles, knees trembling with the weight of their armour by the end of the day.

That was not the stranger. _She_ had moved as if an armoured coat was as light as a linen shirt, as if a sword at the waist was as familiar as a pair of shoes.

_Courier guild._

Courier guild, or a regular in a lord’s service.

_Midita the scribe, unusually observant, put together the clues offered by the stranger_ _’s appearance and manner …_

Now the conversation felt different in her mind, as if she’d reached out to take hold of a snake and instead of dry scales had found herself gripping the slime of an eel. The woman’s utter certainty that she should have thought to send word to Beechdale … had she been right? 

The stranger was going to Beechdale, she’d said, offering to carry word. _And what if she tells them at the Beechdale library, anyway, on her own account?_

_What if she was right, and I should have written to Beechdale, and she tells them that I_ _’ve been derelict in my duty?_

When Weathermere’s new librarian arrived and found _that_ out, Midita would never get her recommendation for her final training. _I_ _’ll be a scribe until I’m eighty._

_No._ That thought was not to be borne. _Realising the need for personal initiative, Midita the scribe was decisive._ She’d send the message today, that’s what she’d do. Right now, in fact, as soon as she could write it and run down to the gates to get Joldita to take it. Joldita was getting on, and her mount was generally whichever of Weathermere’s few riding mounts was rested, but even so, a courier would reach Beechdale before any traveller could.

Midita whisked back downstairs and sat down at the nearest desk. It took her only a few moments to write _I regret that I must inform you of the sudden death of Librarian Pernth_ in her very best hand, and a moment after that she was hurrying down the hill to the town below, chasing her own balance on the steep slope.

She scattered the chickens in Cooper Lane, swung round the sharp turn into Hare Street (indistinguishable from Cooper Lane except by its elevated name) with one hand on the Newel’s balcony, and scurried on. _Midita the scribe nimbly dodged Gerneth Posterly_ _’s cow …_

By the time she reached the gates, Midita was panting. She stopped by the door to the couriers’ stables to run her hands over her hair and take a few deep breaths. Sure she was tidy, and with her dignity back in place, she pushed open the door and went through. “Joldita? I have —”

The room was empty.

And not just-stepped-out-for-a-moment empty, either. Joldita’s saddle was gone from its hook, and so was her courier’s pouch. Midita pressed her lips together in an effort to keep her curses inside her teeth. _Librarians are quiet, and dignified. Oaths and imprecations are beneath them._

_But Sirt_ _’s frozen fingers!_

She went back outside and around to the stables on the side. Two of the three stalls were empty, and only the dappled grey head of Dazzle turned as Midita called out, “Bornir? Are you here?”

A clump of dirty straw flew out from one of the empty stalls and landed with a splat in the aisle. “Always,” the stablehand said, straightening from his work and leaning on the handle of his shovel.

“When will Joldita be back?”

He shrugged. “She went to Smithfield, so … day after tomorrow?”

Midita had to press her lips together again, harder this time. _The day after tomorrow!_ The stranger would reach Beechdale by then, without question. Reach Beechdale, and tell the librarians there that Midita the Weathermere scribe hadn’t thought to tell the nearest library that Weathermere was without one of its three great guilds …

_No_. She would _not_ let that happen. “I need to borrow Dazzle,” Midita said abruptly, ignoring the fact that the grey was intimidatingly large and known to be constitutionally lazy. _Midita the scribe was not deterred by danger._

“You mean, _hire_ ,” Bornir said, not moving.

“This is library business!” Midita protested. It was more-or-less the truth.

“Which means Joldita would be obliged to carry your message free of charge,” Bornir said. “But I’m not courier’s guild, am I? I’ve got a living to make.”

Midita swallowed. Towns were supposed to support their great guilds, in exchange for their services, and Weathermere did. The scribes never went hungry, or unshod, or poorly clad. But Weathermere didn’t often offer the kinds of opportunities a larger town might have, for scribes to earn a few coins writing a personal letter not covered by official duties or copying out a page or two from one of the library’s books for someone with an interest in some obscure topic. Pernth might have liked to talk about how rich in knowledge they all were, but when it came to actual money, Midita was poor. “How much?”

“Four solida,” Bornir said.

_Midita the scribe willingly sacrificed everything she had for the sake the library._ “Alright. But I’ll have to pay you when I get back. This message is urgent.” She held it up, hoping that the official-looking nature of the missive would add weight to her argument. “Bornir, you know I’ll pay you. My word and my guild on it.”

He hesitated, and Midita had a sudden vision of herself pelting back up the hill to scrabble out her few coins from the pouch tucked under her mattress. She sighed in relief when Bornir finally nodded. “Fine,” he said. “But don’t go laming him, or losing him.”

_Midita the scribe was above noticing the stablehand_ _’s implication that she didn’t know how to care for a horse._ “I won’t.”

“You won't be able to get there and back in a day,” Bornir said. He looked her up and down. “Slept in many hedgerows in your time, have you?”

“The Beechdale library will find me a bed,” Midita informed him haughtily.

“And you'll be sharing it with Dazzle? Or did you plan to leave him roaming the streets of Beechdale?”

“Since I am on _library_ business, I'm sure the couriers’ stable at Beechdale will care for him.” If not, well, Midita might not have much experience bedding down in the open, but plenty of people did it. _Midita the scribe counted her own comfort as naught compared to the safety of her steed._

Bornir snorted at that, sounding like one of his charges, but he went to get saddle and tack for Dazzle.

Midita had not ridden often, or recently, and so she was quite pleased when she managed to clamber aboard Dazzle and get her robes tucked securely beneath her. It might not have been the most elegant and graceful exercise, but at least she hadn't toppled backwards or slipped straight off the other side. “Thank you,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage when talking to the grinning stablehand who’d just seen her belly-down across the saddle trying to squirm around to face the right end of the horse.

He handed her the reins. “Take care of him.”

“I will.”

It took several digs of her heels to get Dazzle ambling forward, but he heeded the reins and turned toward the gate willingly enough.

Midita tried to urge him to a faster pace, but in vain. Instead of dashing through the gate at a gallop, she had to be content with setting out on her urgent and important journey, the fate of the library in her hands, at the plodding pace of lazy Dazzle’s walk.

 

 

 


	8. Midita: On The Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Midita finds travel not as she expected.

_Midita the scribe rode out boldly, heedless of danger, the future of Weathermere depending on her mission._

That sounded very fine, but as Midita followed the road to Beechdale as it wound along beside the meandering Irongate River, she was forced to admit to herself that fine as it sounded, it wasn’t as true as it could have been. Even if the stranger had been right, and there _was_ a greater urgency to getting a new librarian for Weathermere than a message to Ceatertown would allow for, the stranger herself had offered to make sure Beechdale’s library knew about Pernth’s death. Midita had been the one to refuse.

It was less Weathermere’s future that depended on Midita getting to Beechdale as soon as possible, and more Midita’s own. _But you can_ _’t put that in a chronicle._

Perhaps _Midita the scribe rode out boldly, determined to do her duty._ It was less dramatic, and consequently less interesting. Pernth had always lectured her on the importance of keeping a reader’s interest. He’d shaken his head over the pages of the Weathermere annal penned by the last librarian but two. Midita had never met the woman, but it was clear from her work that she had a passion for geography. _And then the forces of the Cross-Eyed Queen marched north, camping on the first night at Burndale, on the river Dis, one mile east from the ford of the Swallowspear road_ _…_

Pernth had slammed the book shut with considerably less than his usual care. _I_ _’m already asleep! The woman’s writing about the last, doomed stand of the armies of Here against the great demon invasion and it’s as boring as Kildeth’s treatise on the eighty-seven different kinds of disease in sheep!_

Drama and interest were important, but he also insisted that accuracy was essential. You kept the reader interested, Pernth always insisted, by leaving out the dull details and concentrating on the important facts. But facts they had to be, to be in chronicles or annals, otherwise how would anyone know what had really happened and what some librarian had thought _ought_ to have happened?

So _Midita the scribe rode out boldly, determined to do her duty._ She didn’t need to include the fact that after the road parted company from the river and led her into open fields, she began to wish she’d worn a hat. Nor would any reader of her chronicle need to know that Dazzle’s broad back made her legs ache more and more as the day wore on, or that her mount didn’t seem to share her own sense of bold purpose and could only occasionally be coaxed into shambling into a trot, and then not for long.

She certainly didn’t need to include the fact that when they were less than half-way there, Dazzle decided he was hungry and stopped dead on the road to graze at the verge.

Midita tugged on the reins, to no avail. She kicked him in the ribs, which he didn’t seem to even notice. She tried begging him, which did as little good as tugging and kicking. She was trying all three in combination, her eyes burning with tears of frustration that she absolutely _refused_ to shed, when a woman spoke directly behind her.

“Trouble with your horse?”

Dazzle steadfastly refusing to be distracted from his snack, Midita was forced to crane awkwardly over her shoulder to see who was speaking to her.

Three travelers. A child, riding a bay pony that Midita recognized as the sturdy little animal people in Weathermere used to haul heavy loads up the steep and narrow streets. Only the child’s mouth and sharp little chin were visible beneath the flopping brim of a ridiculously absurd hat, but that mouth was turned up at one corner in an amusement that Midita was certain was at her own expense.

Beside the child, a man, hair as dark as a midnight murder, riding Dazzle’s stablemate Whisper. He was grinning outright at Midita’s plight. And right next to Midita, reaching out to take Dazzle’s reins —

The stranger from the library.

“On your way to Beechdale, are you?” The stranger wrenched at Dazzle’s reins, and he raised his head as if he hadn’t been ignoring Midita for ten minutes. “Leave it, you great greedy beast.”

“I am,” Midita said with as much dignity as she could muster. “My horse was hungry.”

“He was born hungry and he’ll die hungry, if I know the type.” The stranger’s own horse, Midita noticed enviously, stood like a statue, only the flick of an ear betraying he was flesh and blood and not stone. “He won't listen if you saw at his mouth like that. Tug, don't pull.”

“I'll remember.” Midita sounded stiff and priggish even to her own ears. She forced herself to add, “Thank you.”

The woman leaned over to pat Dazzle’s neck, as if stretching out of the saddle without losing one’s balance was as easy as reaching for a cup set down on the other side of the table. “The problem with this big lad is that someone's let him realize he weighs ten times as much as anyone who'll ever be on his back. He's worked out that he can do what he likes and no one can stop him.”

“ _You_ stopped him,” Midita pointed out.

“My father breeds horses, I've had some experience. You're Midita, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Kilda,” the woman said. She pointed at the man, and then the child. “Tait and Ifita. Since we're all bound for Beechdale, we may as well ride together.”

Midita wanted to gallop up the road and leave all three of them, and the scene of her humiliation, in a cloud of dust. That wasn't very likely when she was riding Dazzle, though. _At least if we're together, they won't reach Beechdale before me._

_And maybe Dazzle will be shamed into picking up his pace._

“We may as well,” she agreed.

Whether it was Kilda, or the presence of his old friend Whisper, Dazzle seemingly decided that he could sustain a slightly faster pace if it meant staying with the others. Midita gritted her teeth as already-strained muscles protested further. _Midita the scribe ignored her own discomfort, mind bent on the importance of her mission._ She hoped the road would take them out of the broad fields soon and into some sort of shade, although when she peered ahead it ran on steadily to the horizon, not a tree in sight.

“You don’t ride much, do you?” the girl, Ifita, said.

“No,” Midita admitted. “I’m a library scribe. The last time I traveled was to come to Weathermere, four years ago.”

Ifita turned to look up at Midita. The movement revealed more of her face — a sharp little nose and tilted eyes above that pointed chin and determined mouth. “Where from?”

“Ceatertown,” Midita said, with what was entirely-justified pride. “I was trained there, at the King’s own library.”

“Oh.” Ifita didn’t sound particularly impressed. “Do you know King Pethnir, then?”

“I’ve met him.” Actually, it would have been more accurate to say _I_ _’ve seen him_ , because a scribe, even one in the king’s library, didn’t exactly _meet_ the king himself. But Midita _had_ seen King Pethnir, on more than one occasion, the King of Corvale being an active sort of ruler who did most of his sitting on the back of his horse rather than on his throne. She’d seen him crossing the courtyard to ride out of the great gates in the thick stone wall that surrounded the buildings that crowned Ceatertown’s steep hill, and she’d seen him ride back through those gates. On one occasion, he’d been in such high good humor that when Midita bowed her head as he passed, he’d grinned at her and told her not to spend all her time with her books.

When it came to kings and scribes, that was as good as _meeting_.

Ifita twitched the reins of her pony and somehow made him edge closer to Dazzle. “What’s he like?”

“Like?” Midita gaped for a moment, and then remembered that she was a scribe and a librarian-in-training, almost anyway, and closed her mouth with a snap. “Well, he’s … he’s kingly.”

Kilda snorted. “Of course he’s kingly. He’s the king, whatever he’s like is kingly. If he took a fancy to ride stark naked through the city streets, that would be kingly.”

“Also Lady-touched,” Tait said.

“Then it would be kingly to be Lady-touched.”

Tait laughed. “Oh, yes, it would, for the fifteen minutes it took for someone to realize how awkward it would be to have a king out of his own mind when the Snakkinen next come calling, and arranged for all that naked riding to cause an unfortunately fatal chill.”

“The King,” Midita said repressively, “is not Lady-touched. Nor does he ride naked.”

“He did once, actually,” Ifita said. “On a bet. Or a dare, I forget which. But it was a long time ago, before he was king.”

“Nonsense,” Midita said.

Ifita glared at her. “It is _not_ nonsense, my —”

“Iffy,” Kilda said quickly.

The girl subsided. “It isn’t nonsense, anyway,” she muttered.

“Old stories,” Tait said easily. “Names change, dates change, details change. Maybe it was king-to-be Pethnir, maybe it was one of his brothers, maybe it was some lord half-a-hundred years ago, before the demons came.”

Ifita shot him a look, but then nodded. “Maybe,” she conceded.

“So, King Pethnir is kingly,” Kilda said. “How, exactly?”

“He’s very tall.” Midita said. “And he has red hair, of course.”

Tait grinned at her. “Both very important. And he has a crown, of course, and a throne. Those are essential to kingliness.”

Midita tried to think of something else to say, some way to convey to the three of them that King Pethnir was undeniably a _king_ , to anyone who say him. “He looks … stern. But …” _Kind_ was the wrong word, for the flash of humor that sometimes lit King Pethnir’s keen blue eyes, for the sharp interest he showed in everything that his gaze passed over.  “He looks like a king,” she finished lamely.

Ifita sighed audibly. “You’re not very good at describing.”

Midita’s hands tightened a little on Dazzle’s reins. Librarians had to be able to describe things, and people, had to make them live and breathe in the lines of their chronicles and annals and consequently, in the imaginations of those who read them. “He’s not very easy to describe.” She could just imagine Pernth’s reaction to _that_. “He never seems to be in a hurry but he always looks like he has somewhere he’s going, somewhere he needs to be. He looks stern, unless he’s talking to someone, and then he doesn’t look stern at all. When he speaks, he sounds a little hoarse, always.”

Ifita nodded. “That’s because he ruined his voice screaming orders above the noise of battle on the day the Snakkinen reached Merrowshore. That was the day his brother died, the day he won the first of his five victories.”

Midita turned in the saddle to look down at the girl on her sturdy little pony, nearly lost her balance, and hastily faced forward again. “How do you know that?”

“I —” Ifita glanced at Kilda. “I heard someone saying it, once.”

“Well, it’s true. It’s in the chronicles.” This was familiar ground, far easier than trying to put her own imprecise memories of King Pethnir into words, and Midita felt her back straighten.  “When the conclave met two days later, he still couldn’t speak above a whisper to put his argument to be named king. There were five candidates within the three generations. Pethnir, his cousin Tinilda, his cousin Garethnir, and his two nephews Hornth and Haldnir. The other four spoke first, and their arguments were strong. Tinilda was the eldest living descendant of the Cross-eyed Queen, and had been Lady Rowelmere for ten years, and Rowelmere had prospered and grown rich. Garethnir had led troops in all the battles for all three of Pethnir’s brothers. Hornth and Haldnir were young, but strong and fierce in battle, and the sons of kings. When all four had spoken, and Pethnir was silent, everyone present thought the election would be between four and not five candidates, and Pethnir was only there out of formality.”

“And then what happened?”

Midita couldn’t suppress a small smile at the eagerness in Ifita’s voice. _Midita the scribe wove an expert tale, captivating her listeners._ “Pethnir strode to the front of the meeting hall and flung his sword on the table. It was still red from tip to hilt with Snakkinen blood. While everyone stared at it, Pethnir turned and sat down on the throne as if there was no question to debate. And from that moment, there wasn’t. He’s been king ever since.”

Ifita nodded. “Which is why Corvale doesn’t get raided, and Belpond does. They have a real king.”

Midita hesitated. “There are differing opinions on King Nedrith.” The annals and the chronicles recorded Nedrith as Belpond’s king, but outside their pages, Pethnir’s uncle, Corthnir, was the Last King. Not in the court, not in treaties or letters or the formal records of the realm, but in the streets, in songs, in every casual reference. _She hasn_ _’t swept her floor since the Last King sat on his throne,_ Midita’s mother had sniffed in disapproval over a neighbor’s housekeeping and _that_ _’ll last you until there’s a king on Belpond’s throne_ her father had said, giving her eldest brother his first sword. When Midita took down a letter or a contract, she always wrote the date _in the year 35 of King Nedrith_ _’s reign_ but, more often than not, what the person dictating to her actually said was _in the year 35 since kings._

Tait snorted. “Nedrith might be a nitwit, and he may or may not be your king, but the nature of the arse on the throne isn’t the reason Corvale has peace and Belpond still fires the beacons every Blood Moon.”

“If he was a real king —” Ifita said hotly.

Tait spoke over her. “He’d be as helpless against the realities of the map as anyone. Belpond borders Eadie and Yenlake. Corvale doesn’t. It suits your grand and kingly Pethnir to have Nedrith wearing Belpond’s crown. As long as he does, the Snakkinen have no need to rule in Belpond, and as long as they don’t rule in Belpond, Corvale is too far away for their restless young men to steal cattle and kill farmers. You might not like your puppet king, little missy, but if he wasn’t there you wouldn’t see your own kind sitting in the halls of Linkeep and Abethan. And you might think King Pethnir’s a great hero, but he hasn’t shown any sign of sending his great and mighty army to see someone else on Belpond’s throne, and nor will he.”

“You don’t know anything about it.” Ifita’s mouth was set in a tight line.

“And neither do you,” Kilda said, and Midita was puzzled by the note of warning in her voice. “And all those questions are far above the understanding of the likes of you and me, and irrelevant besides, since Nedrith is king, like it or not.”

“I _don_ _’t_ like it and he’s _not_ king.” Ifita made her protest in an undertone.

“These things can be more complicated than it’s easy to understand,” Midita said comfortingly. _She really is a bright little girl, if not quite as clever as she thinks she is._

Ifita glared at her, and opened her mouth, but before she could speak Kilda reined in her horse and raised herself a little in the stirrups. “Look ahead.”

All three of them copied her. At least, Tait and Ifita brought their mounts to a stop and Dazzle halted as well, of his own accord, now his stablemate and his new friends were stationary. He sidled a few steps to the side of the road and lowered his head to crop the grass there. Midita spent a futile few seconds trying to get him to stop, but even Kilda’s advice to tug rather than pull was ineffective against Dazzle’s greed, at least when applied by Midita.

Giving up, she twisted to see what the other three were looking at. At first nothing seemed unusual about the warm afternoon — the fields on either side filled with barley showing the first tints of gold as it began to ripen, a windbreak of trees showing a shiver of leaves where a breeze touched them, the white dusty road winding on ahead.

Then she saw it: a cloud of dust, where the road met the horizon. “Other travelers.”

“Yes.” Kilda glanced at Tait, and then at Ifita, as if _other travelers_ wasn’t something everyone would expect to meet on the roads, especially so soon after the week of Mead Moon, during which only the most urgent and essential journeys were made. “And a lot of them, from the size of that cloud.”

“Weathermere doesn't offer many attractions.” Tait’s words were mocking but his tone was serious.

“And these fields don’t offer much cover,” Kilda said. Her mouth tightened. “Nothing for it, then. Ready, Iffy?”

Ifita nodded, adjusting the brim of her hat. “Yes, auntie Kilda.”

Kilda touched her heels to the sides of her horse and got him moving forward. “Then let’s go.”


End file.
